President Obama will this week become the first African American President to make an official visit to an African country.

The most interesting fact is that he does not go to South Africa or Nigeria - the two countries that compete for the unofficial title of leaders of black Africa. President Obama decided to go to the oil producing belt of West Africa, and this cut out South Africa;  then he chose the unassuming Ghana, rather then the feisty Nigeria - the most populous black state and important partner of the US in oil trade.

Why? What does he teach in this visit?

Nigeria is a corrupt state to its bone. Even its son, the Nobel Price winning Wole Soyinka said that neglecting Nigeria was just the right medicine that Nigeria needed. He continued then with the shocking statement: “I’d ’stone’ Obama if he showed up in Nigeria and conferred legitimacy on its sorry government.”

Ghana on the other hand, a much smaller West African nation, as of now with little US trade, did hold fair multiparty democratic elections since 1992, and  has a history of incumbents stepping down once they reach their term limits.

Ghana is a beacon of hope to Africa and has produced the only two-terms African UN Secretary-General, Koffi Annan, who we hope will be at hand when President Obama arrives for a day at the end of this week.

Yes, we know, it is rumored that the US is interested in Ghana also as it is the newest arrival to the West Coast Oil-belt, and with China making inroads in the region, the US might be interested to establish here a military base as well as an oil trade relationship.

But even so, this US President showed preference for clean government if this is at all possible.

Africa watch and learn!

Franny Armstrong Informs us that Scotland has become the first nation world-wide to comply in full with the IPCC CO2 emissions’ cut.  It is a 42% cut based on 1990 by 2020.

Compare above with the US 14% based on 2005 by 2020 - it is indeed more then 10 times the cuts suggested in the US House of Representatives legislation and 5 times the EU’s 20 by 2020 plans.

 http://www.christianaid.org.uk/ActNow/Co…

Scotland! Bonny, bonny Scotland has finally passed its own Climate Act, and in the process has become the first rich nation to commit to mid-term targets that are actually in line with the IPCC’s guidelines for avoiding that dreaded 2˚C threshold. Massive bigups to Stop Climate Chaos, WWF, Christian Aid and Friends of the Earth Scotland for all their work to make that happen, as well as everyone else who took the time to lobby their MSPs about this. Scotland actually now leads the developed world in climate mitigation policy. Who knew?

 http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/20…

      Scottish parliament agrees tougher 42% target to cut emissions.

Campaigners say ‘hugely significant’ vote to cut emissions by 42% by 2020 sets new ‘moral’ standard for the rest of the industrialised world

Scotland has set itself the world’s most ambitious greenhouse gas reduction targets after the Scottish parliament voted today to cut the nation’s CO2 emissions by 42% by 2020.
In a rare show of unity, all political parties at Holyrood unanimously agreed to fix the target as part of a radical climate change bill which also requires the Scottish government to set legally binding annual cuts in emissions from 2012.

The measures are tougher than the 34% target set in the UK government’s climate change act last year, which has no statutory annual targets. In common with UK government aspirations, the new act also commits Scotland to an 80% reduction on 1990 levels by 2050.

The campaign coalition Stop Climate Chaos Scotland, which claims its 60 member organisations represent two million people, said this “hugely significant” vote set a new “moral” standard for the rest of the industrialised world.

It comes the day after the US stated that a 40% cut by 2020 was “not on the cards”: developing nations have demanded this level of cut from rich nations.

Kim Carstensen, head of WWF International’s global climate initiative, said: “At least one nation is prepared to aim for climate legislation that follows the science. Scotland made the first step to show others that it can be done. We now need others to follow.”

However, the new measures are already under intense scrutiny. The act allows ministers to reduce the target later this year if the UK government’s advisory panel on climate change says it is unrealistic, or the UN climate change conference in Copenhagen in December fails to agree on a global deal to replace Kyoto.

Environment groups are critical of the Scottish government’s refusal to abandon road, bridge and airport expansion programmes, its plans for a new coal-fired power station, and its unwillingness to tackle directly increasing car use.

Furthermore, Scottish ministers only directly control about 30% of Scotland’s total annual emissions of 68m tonnes of CO2 – which only equates to a 700th of the world’s emissions. Most significant policies are controlled in Brussels and London, critics point out.

About 40% is covered by the European Union carbon emissions trading agreement, while the UK government has policy responsibilities for a further 30% of Scotland’s emissions. That includes fuel taxation, low emission vehicles, VAT on energy efficiency and air taxes.

The Committee on Climate Change, the panel set up to advise Gordon Brown’s government, has warned Salmond that Scotland is effectively jumping the gun by setting a 42% target in advance of a deal at Copenhagen.

In a letter to Stewart Stevenson, the Scottish climate change minister, the committee’s chief executive, David Kennedy, said it believes Scotland should follow the UK strategy of waiting until the Copenhagen conference.

If a deal is reached, it should follow the UK government’s lead and only then set a 42% target.

The Scottish government had also increased the pressure on itself by including emissions from international aviation and shipping in its target, Kennedy wrote, even though it has no control over policy for these sectors.

“I would therefore consider that an appropriate Scottish 2020 target could be set slightly below 34% to account for different treatments of international aviation under UK and Scottish approaches.”

Despite these criticisms, the chairman of Stop Climate Chaos Scotland, Mike Robinson, said the significance of the all-party consensus could not be underestimated.

“It means Scotland’s climate change bill has the toughest target of any industrialised nation in the world and will be held up as an example, ahead of the climate talks in Copenhagen in December, of what can and should be done,” he said.

“This is a moral commitment and we hope other developed nations will hear this call for action and follow Scotland’s lead.”

Although on renewable energy the Scottish National party is very likely to surpass its ambitious targets to deliver half of Scotland’s electricity from renewables by 2020, ministers have failed to embark on any politically unpopular measures to combat car use or the growth in short-haul aviation.

It has authorised a second road bridge over the Firth of Forth and abandoned bridge tolls, paid to extend the M74 motorway, supports a new ring road around Aberdeen and dualing the A9 and wants a major new coal-fired power station.

Its most ambitious emissions-reduction policies, such as using carbon capture for all fossil fuel power stations, using marine energy, and a wholesale switch to green transport, either have targets set at 2030 or are largely UK-government controlled. The SNP has also completely ruled out any new nuclear power stations.

——————-

Scotland ‘Leads the World’ in the Fight Against Climate Change

The Scottish Parliament today (Wednesday 24 June) led the world by passing the strongest climate change legislation of any industrialised nation.

MSPs voted in favour of legislation that commits Scotland to:

at least 80% cuts of all greenhouse gases (on 1990 levels) by 2050
a 2020 target of at least 42% reduction in greenhouse gases
include the full effects of emissions from international aviation and shipping from the start
a strong duty on all public bodies to make a full contribution to tackling climate change
strong energy efficiency measures to tackle fuel poverty and save energy
Stop Climate Chaos Scotland (SCCS) has been campaigning for three years to see these key elements included in the Bill.

Mike Robinson, Chair of Stop Climate Chaos Scotland, said: This is a truly momentous day. The Scottish Parliament has voted for legislation that will be held up as a positive example to the world ahead of climate talks in Copenhagen in December. An emissions reduction target of at least 42% and the inclusion of aviation and shipping from the start sets Scotland’s Bill apart from the UK Act. We hope other developed nations will hear this call for action and follow Scotland’s lead. Now that MSPs from all parties have made these moral commitments, they have a responsibility to do what is necessary to deliver them.

Stop Climate Chaos Scotland commends the Liberal Democrats and Greens for introducing robust targets early in the process and Labour and the SNP for their strong targets as the Bill neared conclusion.

—————
To the Editor:

Re “In Climate Change Bill, What May Become an Election-Year Issue” (Congressional Memo, June 27, The New York Times):

I can only hope that voters will take the time to read what the scientists are saying and see through the hot air offered by those politicians who deny global warming and deny the urgency of the situation.

Michael Yellin
Montclair, N.J., June 28, 2009

•

To the Editor:

“Betraying the Planet,” by Paul Krugman (column, June 29, The New York Times), recognizes that we can no longer afford to deny global warming, particularly in light of heavy Republican opposition to the Waxman-Markey bill that was passed in the House on June 26. Refuting global warming certainly constitutes betraying the planet, yet, surprisingly enough, so does supporting the bill.

A minority of the 212 representatives who voted against the bill did so because they considered the bill too weak. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said that countries should cut their emissions by 25 to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020. Yet the short-term target in the bill offers only a 4 percent reduction by 2020, which just begins to signal the numerous problems with the bill.

Supporting this bill is a step backward and would only further betray the planet and give in to these global warming deniers.

Brian Howe
Manlius, N.Y., June 30, 2009

•

“The Global Deal: Climate Change and the Creation of a New Era of Progress and Prosperity” - a book
by Sir Nicholas Stern as presented by Joanne J. Myers to the Carnegie Council - Ethics in International Affairs, New York City - May4th, 2009.

 http://www.cceia.org/resources/transcrip…

The Global Deal: Climate Change and the Creation of a New Era of Progress and Prosperity.

Ma4y 4, 2009

Introduction JOANNE MYERS: I’m Joanne Myers, Director of the Public Affairs Program. On behalf of the Carnegie Council, I’d like to welcome our members and guests, and to thank you for joining us on this rainy Monday morning.
Today, our speaker is a world-renowned economist, Nicholas Stern.

Lord Stern is a man of many achievements. But the one that is most relevant to our discussion this morning is his work on climate change. Since the release of the 2006 Stern Review on the economics of climate change, commissioned by Gordon Brown when he was the Chancellor of the Exchequer, this seminal document and the ongoing debate on this subject has made Lord Nicholas the man to turn to when questions about the costs and benefits of dealing with global warming arise.

In fact, from what I’ve read, it seems as if almost every significant discussion of climate change since has drawn heavily on his findings. This report has now been transformed into a book for the general public and is entitled The Global Deal: Climate Change and the Creation of a New Era of Progress and Prosperity.

In focusing on the economics of climate change, Sir Nicholas shifted the debate away from polar bears and unseasonable summers and reframed the argument in the cold language of the balance sheet. In The Global Deal, Lord Stern evaluates our economic future and the essential steps we must take to protect growth and reduce poverty while managing climate change. He is guided by three principles, those of effectiveness, efficiency and fairness. By proposing green technologies, international emissions trading, and financing to halt deforestation, he lays out the technological and economic foundations for new industries by which he believes we can overt a catastrophe.

At the heart of his work is a simple calculation, which is if the science of climate change is right, the transition costs incurred by switching to low-carbon economy will, however daunting, be a fraction of what we will face by averting disaster. In other words, the cost of doing nothing about global warming would be very high, while the cost of transforming our energy system would be relatively low.

Climate change is often an awkward issue for governments to address, as the costs are immediate, while benefits only accrue in the future. Even so, understandings will be vital this year, as the world’s nations and their negotiators count down toward a UN climate conference to be held in Copenhagen in December. This is a target day for concluding a grand new deal to replace the Kyoto Protocol, the 1997 agreement that reduced carbon dioxide and other global warming emissions by industrial nations.

While we may be a planet in peril and the global financial crisis could distract us from the bigger task of tackling climate change, Lord Stern sees global warming as an opportunity to bring forward investments in low-carbon technologies. In the long-term, these efforts could provide sustainable and well-founded economic growth.

Please join me in giving a very warm welcome to a very distinguished guest. We are honored to have you with us.

——–

Remarks

NICHOLAS STERN: Thank you very much, Joanne. That was a very kind introduction. And thank you all very much for coming today.

Since the Stern Review was published two and a half years ago, much of my time has been spent, since I’m back in academic life, arguing with my fellow economics professors about the best way to look at these issues. And we’re doing all right with that. They’re starting to understand just how big this is and what that means for the kind of economics that they have to bring to bear. So I sort of went back into academic life and wrote academic papers, which you wouldn’t want to read unless you’re heavily into mathematical economics.

But the other part of what I’ve been doing is working with people around the world, particularly in developing countries, which was the big part of my professional life before I got involved in climate change. In Europe, my own country the U.K., still part of Europe, and the U.S., for two years or so, I’ve been intensely involved in these discussions. And these have shaped, in large measure, the structure of the book, and indeed, my motivation for writing the book.

So what I want to do in the time I’ve got is to explain something about the global deal. How would we come to an international agreement to tackle climate change? What would it look like? What principles should it be built on? But before you can do that, you have to understand yourself why it is that you need such an agreement. But also, the quantitative analysis of why you need such an agreement actually shapes the agreement itself in very large measure.

So what I want to do is to begin with the logic of the problem, why it’s so important, the scale of what we have to do, because that shapes everything else. The scale shapes everything else, and the logic of the problem itself, because it’s a risk management problem, with long time lags. That also shapes the kind of agreement that we should be putting together and the difficulties in putting it together. So let me explain, from the beginning, in a very simple and fast way, I hope, the basic science, how that shapes the economics you should bring to bear to analyze the problem. And then on the basis of those things, what the global deal should look like.

I know that most of you are not economists. There’s a lot of economics underlying what I will say. I won’t go into it in any detail. The fact that you’re not economists is your fault. Most of you would have had the opportunity at some point in your life, and you didn’t take it. But I am not going to dwell on that. But those of you who are economists will recognize that there’s quite a lot of difficult stuff underlying what I have to say.

So here is the problem. It starts with people and it ends with people. People, through their lives, their production consumption, the way they live, emit greenhouse gases. They emit more greenhouse gases than the earth can absorb. And therefore, the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere rises. So there is a flow stock problem. And that’s critical to the logic of the whole thing. The flow of emissions, because they’re not fully absorbed, adds to the stock.

The next link in the chain is from the increase in stocks of greenhouse gases to temperature increases. That’s the very simple greenhouse effect. It’s a piece of science that goes back nearly 200 years now to French mathematician and physicist, Fourier. By the end of the 19th century, the gases that were causing this effect were basically identified, and there was some initial quantitative work on how big some of these effects might be.

The greenhouse effect is very simple physics and chemistry. Those of you who have been in a greenhouse will have noticed that it’s warmer in the greenhouse than outside. The very good reason is that the glass in the greenhouse prevents some of the infrared energy escaping, and that’s how the greenhouse effect in the atmosphere works. It’s not mysterious or complex or dubious science. It’s just a very basic physics and chemistry effect.

So from global warming, from increased concentrations, increased temperatures, from increased temperatures to climate change. And the language of climate change is the language we should use, not global warming, because it’s climate change that causes the problem. And most of it’s through water, in some shape or form. Storms, floods, droughts, sea level, sea level rise. The temperature does have a direct effect, in some cases, through heat stress, changing the length of growing seasons and so on. But basically, it’s the effect of the increased temperature on the climate that’s the issue. And, of course, those effects, storms, floods, droughts, sea level rise, have a very direct impact on people.

So that’s the logic of the problem: Key aspects of that chain of events—there were five links in the chain, you were counting, that I just described. The logic of that problem shapes the economics and the politics of it all in a very profound way. First, the atmosphere doesn’t recognize where the greenhouse gases came from. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Los Angeles or Beijing or Johannesberg or London. They have the same effect. It’s global in its origins and it’s global in its impact. That global feature of the problem is absolutely fundamental.

There are lots of things that we do in life that damage what other people can do. When we take our car out, we slow other people down. If we emit, as we did in London and many other places, soot from coal fires, we give people bronchitis and heart disease. But you can see, in a very direct way, how these effects are working. They’re local, and the effects are fairly observable, and they’re fairly immediate. This is a global problem and many of these effects have long legs. So the links in the chain I describe, some of them take years or even decades to manifest themselves. That, again, affects the politics of all of this in a fairly profound way. So by the time you see these effects with their full force, it’s actually too late to head many of them off.

So you can see the way in which the logical structure here has a profound effect on what you should do and how you should do it and how you see your relationships with others. Also, this flow stock story is critical because it means the costs of delay are immense. When you have a collapse of WTO talks, as we do in life, you get together five years later, and it’s a pity that you lost those five years, but you resume roughly where you were. This is not the case with climate change, because you would have had those increased flows which increase the stocks. And you’re in a more difficult starting point five years down the track.

So this logical structure, the problem, is very important in what you can do in the politics of it all. I’ll come back to that in just a moment in one or two respects, although it runs right through what I’m saying in the book. But let me just describe the magnitude. And here, you will need a little bit of mental arithmetic. It’s not hard stuff. But it’s very important that we get a feel for the numbers. We start around where we are now, around 435 parts per million of CO2 equivalent. That’s the measure of the stock, the concentrations, at the moment, 435 parts per million of CO2 equivalent. 380-something of that is CO2. And then the rest is other greenhouse gases translated into CO2 equivalent. We’re adding about two and a half parts per million a year. And that two and a half is rising. So since the two and a half we’re adding a year is rising, averaged over a century, we would be adding, on average, well over three parts per million a year. So a century of that, it’s a bit over 300. Add a bit over 300 to 435. If we didn’t do much, at the end of the century, we’d be about 750 parts per million.

If we stopped it right there, what would the temperature eventually be within a decade or two or three? It would be about probably around five degrees centigrade, or roughly 50/50 probability of being above or below five degrees centigrade. All of this has to be expressed in probability. This is a risk management issue. What does five degrees centigrade look like? Well, we’re not sure because we haven’t been there for about 30 million years as a planet. We’ve experienced five degrees below that quite often. Well, very recently, actually, 10 or 12,000 years ago, the last Ice Age when the ice sheets came down roughly to New York and London, natural benchmarks for latitude.

But where were people? Of course, there were quite a lot of people around 10, 12,000 years ago. People have been around 100—well, it depends how you count people, but 100,000, 200,000, depending on your definition of Homo Sapiens, or depending on your definition of sapiens, I suppose. But 100/200,000 years, humans have been around, we haven’t seen five degrees centigrade for 30 million years. At that time, the Eocene period, the world was covered in swampy forests. Very little ice, anyway. Five degrees centigrade below, we have seen, much more frequently.

And, of course, both of these things, five degrees up or five degrees down, transform where people can be. They rewrite the rivers. They rewrite the coastlines. Most of where we are, as humans, is shaped by rivers and coastlines. Southern Europe would probably look like the Sahara Desert. People would have to move. People would move on an enormous scale, just as they moved when it was five degrees centigrade lower. People haven’t seen five degrees centigrade higher, nowhere near. Three degrees centigrade 2 or 3 million years ago.

Again, way, way before humans. So we don’t really know how we would react to that, other than to be able to say where we could live and how we could live would be radically different. The snows would go off the Himalayas, the big rivers of the world would get rewritten—I mean, the big rivers of the world, in terms of the populations that they present. The big majority of them, not all of them, of course, but the big majority of them arise in a few hundred square kilometers of the Himalayas. Now, if you just go clockwise around from the Yellow River to the Yangtze to the Ganges and the Brahmaputra and the Jumna and the Indus. You’re talking about rivers that are the main sources of water for countries with a couple of billion people, with a billion or so or more directly affected by those rivers. You would just rewrite where people would be. Populations would move. Hundreds of millions, probably billions of people would move, and we would have extended world conflict.

This is not Nick Stern, the economist, describing this. This is simply Nick Stern relaying to you what the science tells us in a very direct way. But I’m expressing it in a way that allows us to start thinking about this as an insurance story or a risk management story in what we’re ready to pay to reduce the odds. If we held these concentrations of greenhouse gases below 500 parts per million, which we could with strong action, and I’ll describe what it is and what it would cost, if we held those concentrations below 500 parts per million, that 50/50 probability being above five degrees centigrade would come down to something like 3 percent. And that’s a huge insurance gain, a huge rich risk reduction, if we did manage to hold it below 500 parts per million.

We can’t hold it below 450. We will be at 450 in about six years. I mean, we’re adding two and a half a year, and six times two and a half is 15. Add that to 435. You know, in six years, we’re at 450. But we can hold below 500. And we can also be thinking about how we bring it on down from there. It takes a while to do that, and even 500 is a very dangerous place to be. Far, far less dangerous than 750, obviously. But we could work out how to bring it on down from there.

What would it cost us? Very roughly speaking—I could have told the story in three, four, five, six degrees centigrade, but just to be specific and to cut down the time, I told it in terms of five. But it’s the whole distribution that counts, not just one particular temperature like five degrees centigrade. What would it cost us? Well, relative to business as usual, we would probably have to take out about 65 gigatons of CO2 equivalent. What do we have to do? We have to get down from the over 50 gigatons that we emit each year at the moment. We have to get down to about 20 gigatons by 2050. That’s, roughly speaking, the path associated with holding below 500. In 1990, we were at 40 gigatons. So getting down to 20 gigatons in 2050 is cutting by 50 percent, relative to 1990.

So globally, the kind of path I described of holding below 500 involves getting down to about 20 gigatons as a flow. 500 is the stock. Getting down to about 20 gigatons is a flow by 2050. And that involves —depends on how you define business as usual, but taking out around 65 gigatons. And now you have to do another piece of arithmetic. It’s only multiplication. It’s not hard. 65 gigatons. We could probably do that at an average, and an average costs about $30 a ton. So $30 a ton times 65 gigatons. Well, you’ve obviously got 195 in there or 1.95 or 19500, however you do the numbers, and, of course, you’ve got to get your decimal points in the right place when you do this sort of thing. You’ve got to remember that giga is billion. Scientists like giga. Economists like billion. But giga, billion, same thing. So it’s actually, when you multiply 65 gigatons or 65 billion tons by $30 a ton, it’s 1.95 trillion, 2 trillion dollars, close enough.

What will world income be in 2050? It’s a bit over 50 trillion now. If we’re sensible and follow good policies in climate and elsewhere, it could easily double. I mean, not if we don’t, but it could easily double. That makes the arithmetic and the percentages easy. We’re a bit over 50, so a bit over $100 trillion in 2050. So two in 100 or so is around 2 percent. So you can build this up through boring old economic models and so on. But it’s very important to get a feel for why these numbers are what they are.

So for around 2 percent of GDP—I picked that for the year 2050, but it might look something like that for a while, for the next few decades—you buy this enormous reduction in risk. You make the difference between probably destroying the planet, as far as it is a place for life in any sense for humans, as we know it—that’s if you do nothing—but if you act sensibly and pay this very modest insurance premium, you can reduce the risks to levels which are probably manageable.

So that’s basically the story. What does it look like if you try to do this? Well, in the first place, a properly constructed green recovery would help us to get out of a recession. That’s the very, very short run. For the next two or three decades, we will create a technological revolution similar to, probably bigger than, the railways, electricity, the motor car, or IT. We will create a, those of you who like your economic history, we will create a Schumpetarian technology innovation investment-driven story of growth for the next two or three decades. When we get to low carbon growth, we will have something—because it’s the next three, four or five decades that’s the transition to that story—but when we get there, we will have a form of growth which is cleaner, more energy secure, quieter and more biodiverse.

And if we run the clock forward just a bit more, we will have reduced the risk of the transformation of the planet, which would occur as I just described it. This is a no-brainer. I mean, you’ve got the short run returns, you’ve got the driver of the technological story for the next two or three decades, you create a form of low carbon growth that’s much more attractive, and you drastically reduce the risks of major transformation of the planet. It’s just good sense, basic economics.

The wise investors and the wise business people are already out there seeing where this is going. And it’s even getting detailed. I mean, in Korea’s green recovery, they say, well, if the U.S. is going to build a smart grid, smart grids need smarter plants, they’re going to be made here in Korea. And people are already running through this story, seeing the opportunities.

But what we can’t do is pretend that there are no investment costs in this transition. There are investment costs in this transition. They’re serious. But they’re manageable. And they will happen, provided that the governments of the world set the right kind of framework for this to happen. And it means economic policy. It means a price for carbon, through attacks or a trading scheme or a bit of each. It means regulations. It means regulations on emissions. It means doing what we’ve just done in the U.K., announcing that there won’t be any more coal-fired power stations without carbon capture and storage. These are the kinds of policies it needs. It needs public, private partnerships in helping develop new technologies. It needs strong and clear policies to get there.

But basically, here we are. We know the kind of scale that we have to act on. We know the kinds of areas where we have to act, energy efficiency, low-carbon technology, and stopping deforestation. We know the economic instruments that we have to use. “Know,” in this sense, means have a good idea of. But we know enough to set off down the road. And we’re going to discover and learn like mad along the way. So we know the scale, we know the areas where we have to act, we know the kind of economic instruments. It’s now a matter of political will. And it’s this year that is absolutely crucial for putting that political will together.

I’ve already described, actually, one way or another, many aspects of the global deal. But let me now just pull out the global deal, from what I’ve said.

The global deal, if it’s going to be agreed and sustained, will have to be effective on the scale that’s necessary. I’ve already described that.

It will have to be efficient. That will be crucial because there will be serious costs of investing in the transition. It’s crucial to keep those costs as low as possible. If people think we’re wasting money pursuing those policies, then those policies will become politically fragile.

And it’s got to be equitable. Because otherwise, the different countries around the world, the different groups in the population will not support it or would not stay supporting it.

It has to be led by the rich countries. The rich countries, in terms of early action and I think it has to be led by the poor countries in terms of design. Because it’s the poorer countries of the world who are affected earliest and hardest, although we’re all affected, in the story I just described, in a very profound way.

But it’s the rich countries who have to take the lead in action. Why? Because they’re responsible, the 1 billion, out of the 6.7 billion, who live in rich countries, are responsible through their economic history for something like 60 to 65 percent of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere now. They’re largely responsible, through the pursuit of high carbon growth; but this is a very difficult starting point.

We really wouldn’t have wanted to start from here. But we are where we are. And it’s the rich countries who are largely responsible through that pursuit of high carbon growth in the past. Of course, they’re better off, and they have the better developed technologies. So I think the responsibility for early and strong action clearly lie there.

Where do we have to go to in terms of what each country should look like now? Well, I’ve already said we’ve got to get down to 20 gigatons, and I’ve explained why. In 2050, there will be 9 billion of us, roughly speaking, plus or minus a few hundred million. There will be 9 billion. So if we’re emitting, as a world, 20 gigatons, and there are 9 billion of us, remembering again that giga and billion are the same thing, 20 divided by 9, you can all do that, even on a Monday morning, is just over 2. So we’ve got to be down to 2 tons per capita as well, roughly speaking.

Where are we now? Well, Europe, Japan is 10, 12 tons per capita. So to get from 10 to 12 to 2, divide by 5, cut by 80 percent. There’s nothing mysterious in the idea that rich countries should be cutting by 80 percent. 1990 to 2050, it just follows from the arithmetic.

Now, the United States is over 20 per capita. And Barack Obama said we’ll cut by 80 percent, 1990 to 2050. He really meant 90 percent. Because, you know, to get from over 20 down to 2, you’ve got to divide by 10, right? But never mind, we’re a very tolerant lot in Europe. The basic thing is if you set out strongly down the right road, a lot of the arithmetic, a lot of the technology is going to sort itself out later on.

We shouldn’t get overly hung up about exactly 80 or 90 percent. It does matter to have a strong view of where we’re going. And it does matter to set off down that path in a strong way. I mean, that’s what’s crucial. So when we get to Copenhagen, the 2050 will be the anchor for the arithmetic. There’s going to be some very hard bargaining, and there should be, over 2020. Because 2020 is surely an indication of whether we’re serious about getting to where we want to go in 2050. And that’s going to be where, I think, hard stuff is going to come. And it’s already coming in Copenhagen. The Waxman-Markey Bill talks about 7 percent reductions by 2020, relative to 1990 for the U.S. That’s a tough ask, actually, for the U.S., because they’re already 16, 17 percent above 1990. So to get back to 7 percent, below 1990, by 2020, as in Waxman-Markey, means taking off about a quarter in a decade.

Now, this is where the politics of this is going to get tough. Because there are two ways of looking at 2020. I’m sure there are many ways of looking at 2020, but here are two. 2020 is the midpoint between 1990 and 2050. They’re arithmetically unexceptionable. And 2020 is 10 years after 2010. Again, we can’t quarrel with the arithmetic. But the perspective is fundamentally different. Because in countries like the U.S. and Canada, and I was in Canada a couple of days ago talking to environmentalists and others, and there it’s a good deal higher in the U.S. relative to 1990. So to get, say, the U.S. as in Waxman-Markey, I take out of 25 percent in the next ten years is going to be tough.

But then, you know, sitting in India or China or Indonesia or Brazil or South Africa, you’re saying, “I see, you’re going to cut by 80 percent , 1990 to 2050. And at the halfway stage, 80 percent you’re going to take out in six decades. And after three decades, you’ve taken out 7 percent?” How serious does that sound?

So you can see why these two different perspectives on 2020 matter. And I think as a world, we have to recognize we’ve only been serious about this for two or three years. And we are getting serious about this. And that’s what makes me more optimistic about getting a global deal. So that’s going to be hard bargaining and very difficult. But I hope we can get there. It’s going to need a lot of mutual understanding.

But here it is. I more or less described the global deal. It’s 50 percent reductions overall, 1990 to 2050. If people keep going on about percentages, just bring them back to the 20 gigatons in 2050, because that’s what really counts, and the path to get there. 50 percent reductions overall, 80 percent reductions for rich countries.

None of this is going to work unless the developing countries are absolutely at center stage. 8 billion out of the 9 billion people in 2050 are going to be in currently developing countries. If the rich world was emitting precisely zero in 2050, then the average for the developing world would have to be not 2, but 2 1/2 tons per capita. This cannot work unless the big majority of people in the world are involved.

So that’s essentially a story which says that over the next ten years, the developing world will embark on climate change action plans. China described a climate change action plan two years ago, India one year ago, Brazil and South Africa at the end of last year. They’re starting to develop serious engagement in working out how to cut emissions. Now, where I see the global deal working out is the developing world explains to the rich world, these are the conditions. This is conditionality of the developing world on the rich world.

Take those 80 percent cuts you’re talking about. Be credible over the next decade. Develop the technologies. Share them with us. We’ll be developing technologies. We’ll share them with you also. The biggest producer of photovoltaics is in China. One of the biggest windmill producers for electricity is in India. They will be sharing technologies both ways. But develop the technologies, share them with us, help us with the finance, help us with adapting to climate change, because it’s really happening and it will happen, and we need to invest to protect ourselves against what’s going on and to pursue development in a more hostile climate.

You do all of these things, those are our conditions, and we will commit now to taking on targets, say from ten years time. In the meantime, here are our climate change action plans. Please help us with those, because the more you do, the more we can do. This is the way in which this discussion is starting to move, and I think it should move. But building on the kind of commitments, the rich countries are already indicating that they’ll take on.

Trading will be very important, both to bring the costs down, and to allow flows from rich countries to poor countries. The sharing of technologies, I’ve already described. We need explicit mechanisms for doing that. And I’m very happy to discuss those in questions. We have to stop deforestation. It’s responsible for 20 percent of emissions. There’s no way we can achieve these targets without stopping deforestation. China is reforesting, it’s not deforesting. India has declared for a target of 33 percent of the area forested. I think it’s about 22, 23 percent now, isn’t it? So if India makes it, that’s a big change too.

But, of course, it’s the tropical forests which really count—Brazil, Indonesia, Malaysia, Congo, Central America, and so on. Those are the big things that really count there. We have to stop deforestation. That has to be a battle which is integrated into the whole development story. You can’t tackle deforestation in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Brazil unless you help those governments create alternative opportunities, more productive agricultural opportunities outside agriculture, improving the ability to develop and enforce property rights and so on. It has to be integrated in the development story. So you’ve got to stop deforestation.

And we need to look, again, at the challenge of the Millennium Development Goals and beyond about financing for development. Because when we did those calculations—and I am partly responsible, it’s a shared responsibility, for not building climate change in as we should have, because I was Chief Economist at the World Bank when the UN had its Financing for Development Conference in Monterrey in 2002, and I led the writing of the Report for the Commission for Africa in 2005. And in each case, we understated the challenge of climate change for development. But we have to face up as a world to the extra costs of meeting development goals in the context of a changing climate.

So there you are. That’s the global deal. The targets, the trading, the technologies, the finance, the deforestation, and the adaptation story. Huge amounts of detail to work on. But it’s the framework that really counts.

Will we get there? I don’t know. But if we say it’s all too difficult, then nothing is ever going to work—and the U.S. is not going to give up its big hydrocarbon cars, and the British are too lazy to do anything, and the Chinese always cheat—you can tell, I can sit in a bar and tell the story. It’s very easy to do. But if you believe that, what is the consequence?

Well, you can’t wiggle out of the science. I mean, it’s basically clear and there. So if that’s what you really believe, you’re saying, well, we’ve got another 50, 100 years to go in terms of the kinds of life that we got used to leading. And we will, over that period so transform the planet, so that we’ll be living actually in very different and much more difficult ways. So if you’re negative and pessimistic about all this, it’s self-fulfilling. We won’t get there if you all say it’s all too difficult. And the consequences will be very severe. We must be honest about those consequences. So,buy a hat, some suntan lotion and write a letter of apology to your grandchildren. If you really want to push the negative part of the story. So the challenge is not, is it ever going to work? Yeah, it’s all too difficult. The challenge is what do we have to do to try to make it work?
Will we succeed? Of course there’s no guarantee that we’ll succeed. But we can see the way in which we have to try and the way in which we have to work together. And we can see the kinds of scale of activity. We can see the kind of technologies. We can see the kind of economic instruments. We know enough to embark down this road with purpose. If we don’t get a strong agreement in Copenhagen at the end of this year—not all the details, the details can be worked out later. But if we don’t get the basic framework, I would really worry about whether we’ll be able to put it together. Because it falls apart, people go away, and, you know, it might take a long time before we get back together again.

In the meantime, you’ve done a lot of damage in terms of increased concentrations. In the meantime, confidence in the markets that are going to sustain these kinds of investments would have been undermined. So not getting an agreement in Copenhagen, with the basic outlines, not all the details, would be very, very damaging. So this is a crucially important few months for the world really in terms of decision making.

And there’s no way that—you can’t negotiate with the basic scientific processes. You can’t negotiate with the concentrations in the atmosphere. They will be what they will be if we’re neglectful.

I’m much more optimistic than I was two or three years ago because you can see and hear the way in which the understanding and commitment on this issue has changed, whether it be in China or India or the United States or elsewhere. You can see the way that’s changed. The pace of change of technology has been quite remarkable. It’s impossible to give a talk like this to business people without going away with a pocket full of cards if somebody’s got some great idea about how to reduce emissions, how to pull the greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere. If one tenth of these ideas work that are just sort of bubbling through, we can have a whole range of ways of acting, all of which will cost a bit, probably, but, you know, some will be more successful than others.

So in terms of the changing politics, in terms of changing technologies and investments, I’m much more optimistic than I was two or three years ago. I think we’re going to get there in Copenhagen. And the months that follow, I really don’t know. But we’ve got a chance there that we can blow now. And, you know, human beings are not bad at messing up opportunities. But there is an opportunity now to mess up. And one of the reasons I wrote the book was try to reduce the probability that we might. Thank you very much.

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Questions and Answers

QUESTION: Lord Stern, thank you so much for a great talk. Are we being maybe even too optimistic? You paint a pretty bleak scenario, if we don’t do this. Should we have contingency plans in place that would suggest that we need not $30 a ton, but maybe $75 by 2015? Because what we are now seeing with the positive feedback loops, positive in a scientific sense, particularly the change in the Arctic, much more emissions of methane from both the tundra, undersea, et cetera, all of these things, which you know, which would suggest that the window we have to get this done may even be shorter. And therefore, we should be, contingency-wise, at least prepared intellectually to pay a higher cost because the time to get it done is perhaps much shorter than we think it is?
NICHOLAS STERN: These positive feedbacks, things like the melting of the permafrost and releasing a lot of methane, the collapse of the Amazon, which could well happen around three degrees centigrade, which we might be at in 50, 60 years, the decreasing acidity, so the increasing acidity of the oceans which decreases the absorptive capacity, all of these things actually are usually omitted from the formal scientific models. Complication, grounds, difficulty in quantification, but they’re very real possibilities. So it actually does look more worrying than when we were writing two and a half years ago, although all of the basic line of argument is the same.

I think that the description that I gave of cutting by 50 percent as a world, 1990 to 2050, is actually quite unambitious, relative to science. And indeed, many scientists will tell you very loudly what you’re doing, you’re telling me to cut by 50 percent? It should be 80 percent globally by 2050. Although, of course, it is quite ambitious in the point of view of the economics. And many people would draw the conclusion that you drew, that we should be acting faster and more strongly. And therefore, you would be thinking of higher, high costs. Because the faster you do it, the more it costs. So I think that relative to the magnitude of the real scientific problem, I’ve erred on the side of caution.

I’ve erred on the side of caution on the economics. I’ve erred on the side of recklessness, if you like, on the science. So if I were to be pushed to shift in a direction from the one I just articulated, I would certainly go in the direction that you described, that we should be stronger than I am describing, not weaker. And you can make that case, and perhaps you should. I should emphasize, I am talking about average costs. A lot of the costs of what we do actually are negative. I mean, if we’re sensible about a lot of the energy efficiency options we have, we save money. But it won’t all be negative costs. And on the margin, it will be, of course, a good deal higher.

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QUESTION: One problem we face seems to be that we are locked in by the present technology that exists in the U.S., in China, in Europe. Every week, on average, a new coal-fired power plant is being opened in China, with the effect of about 1,000 megawatts. And it’s calculated for over 25 years. And today, as we speak, China is (inaudible) based on clean coal. If they continue to run these, according to their business plan, we will be far off the mark that you have indicated that we need to reach.

So those, the owners, the countries and the private owners of these plants seem, to me, to be unlikely to close down these plants without compensation or to retrofit them. And just imagine what it would cost to retrofit the power of coal fire power plants of this world with carbon capture and storage. It would also increase the energy price by today’s standard by, let’s say, 40 percent . This is, of course, site specific. So what we seem to need is a new set of economic incentives, which means going steps further from the Kyoto mechanisms, which provided some incentives which have worked in some countries, and to provide a larger global scheme that gives the developing countries where the emissions will increase the most, like China, positive incentives for change. And I haven’t seen, so far during the run-up to the Copenhagen, any proposal in pretty language which provides that scene and which links a positive cash flow with achieved reduction targets. I would like to hear your comment on what needs to be done in that direction.

NICHOLAS STERN: I think the ballpark you’re talking about, 40, 50 percent increases in prices of electricity around the world for a few decades, is probably roughly right. If you take a rich country, something like 4 percent of GDP would be primary energy. If you increase that cost by 50 percent , you get back to the 2 percent of national income I’m talking about. So if we’re talking about increasing the price of electricity 50 percent in many places for a while, that is a price that we should be quite ready to pay. And we probably would have to.

My acquaintance with India is much deeper than China. I’ve been living in India, on and off, for different parts of the last 35 years. But I’ve been living in China, again, on and off for 20 years. And the change in China in the last two or three years is quite remarkable in terms of their understanding of the issues. And the 11th five-year plan which finishes at the end of next year, had a a 20 percent reduction target of energy to output, which they probably will reach—of course, if output goes up by 40, 45 percent , and the energy use goes up by 20 some percent, which is what’s happened—but I think the 12th five-year plan, which starts in the end of next year, beginning of the year after—and they’re already working on it and preparing an energy strategy, which would actually precede the 12th five-year plan—I think is likely to have emissions targets rather than energy targets. This is all discussions over the last few months and weeks. But I think that’s where it’s going.

Will countries like China, in terms of growth ambitions, energy ambitions, will they achieve the kinds of transformations we’re talking about without substantial sharing of technology and substantial finance? The answer is no. I described briefly some importance of sharing technologies. But let’s look at the kind of schemes of the trading finance for RT that could do it. Some of you will know about the Clean Development Mechanism, which is a project by project trading arrangement. It’s designed under the Kyoto Protocol, but mostly driven by the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme, whereby a firm that has to meet a target under the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme, can buy a reduction in a developing country. But it’s organized on a project basis. And the firm itself in the developing country, which is selling it to the firm in the rich country, has to show and has to be approved by various committees at the country level in Bonn and so on has to show that it will be cutting its emissions relative to what it might have done.

“What it might have done” is counterfactual. You want to know what I might have done? Well, here is what I might have done. You know, it’s quite difficult to work with this kind of apparatus. And it’s very, very heavy. What we’re going to need for a while, I think for ten or 15 years, possibly more, and we do have to negotiate this at Copenhagen, is a successor to the Clean Development Mechanism, which is one-sided trading, in the sense that you get rewarded if you go down. But you don’t get penalized if you go up. Which can work on a wholesale way.

So the Province of China decides under its program that it’s going to have no further investment in coal-fired without carbon capture and storage. Then we can identify quite clearly the kind of reductions that would involve much more easily than the project by project scheme. And what we should be envisaging is wholesale funds, which arise from the ambitious kind of caps we’ve got in Europe and I trust we will have in the U.S., so that firms combined that fund, and that fund could take a slice of this Province of China that’s embarking on this program.

So I think if we replace the Clean Development Mechanism with something that’s much more suitable for wholesale, that’s programatic, as opposed to project-based, then we could envisage financial flows. And we’ve been modeling them a bit. And they probably would be of the order of somewhere between 100 and 200 billion a year by the 20s under these kind of trading arrangements. That’s the kind of financial structure, trading structure that we would need for a while to support these kinds of investments. And we’ve got to be quantitative and open and direct about what’s involved. There’s another story, of course, in proving that these carbon capture stories technologies work on a commercial scale. And that’s something we have to embark on again, as a world where different countries do different things. The Australians are doing a few, there are a few in the U.K., I’m sure. Canada is doing a few. I’m sure there will be more than a few in the U.S. So at the same time, as we work on the finance, we have to work on the sharing of the technology as well. But that’s exactly the kind of detail we have to work on. And we have to be frank about the scale of what’s involved.

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QUESTION: Thank you again, Lord Stern, for that magisterial performance, which doesn’t surprise any of us. But since I suspect you’re largely preaching to the converted here, I wonder if I might ask you to rebut two of the more persuasive arguments being made by those who disagree with you and with the global warming, simply so we can get those arguments knocked down. And I hear them all the time.

The first is from sort of the view of the Bjørn Lomborg School of the skeptical environmentalist, who essentially sidesteps the case you’re making by saying that even if what you’re saying is true, with the expenditure required to deal with it now is excessive in relation to how much more good you can do to the world by spending a fraction of that money dealing with other things like Malaria and AIDS and development to stop poverty, and drinking water and things like that, and that this is, therefore, a misplaced sense of priority.

And a second argument is broadly what one might call the American conservative argument that says that expecting the world to organize itself today to impose costs upon itself now for possible dangers 100 years down the road is essentially politically irresponsible, that the technologies will find solutions before things ever get that bad. And in the meantime, we should leave well enough alone and let us take care of today’s people, who, of course, happen to be today’s voters, as well. You are going to be imposing short-term costs on people who are not going to necessarily see visible benefits for the costs and pain you’re inflicting upon them. I think those two arguments do require some sort of response from someone like yourself. And I’d love to hear it.

NICHOLAS STERN: I think the response is actually implicit in what I already said. But the challenge you’ve drawn out is absolutely right because this is what we do here. I know Bjørn Lomborg reasonably well. And he’s a rather engaging fellow. But I think he’s more of a stand-up comic than a serious contributor to this. And he’s not an economist or a scientist.

But that’s by the by. Let’s take the argument. What’s the argument? That there are better ways of investing. There’s a whole collection of mistakes in the argument. The first one, and in many ways, the most important, is to treat these as separate projects. The two defining challenges of our century are overcoming world poverty and managing climate change. I’ve spent the big majority of my professional life on the former. One of the reasons I feel so strongly about climate change is that is for the reasons I described, it would undermine the progress that we’ve made and reverse it. We succeed or fail on these two defining challenges together.

As I described it, most of the effects of climate change and their damaging form on human lives come in water in some shape or form. They’re inextricably interlinked. It is just a simple failure in logic to treat the problems of development and water management separately from those of climate change. So when you set it up as sort of separate investment projects with the internal rate of return, you’re just making a basic analytical mistake in relation to the logical structure of the problem. So the argument is just deeply flawed and deliberately misleading.

He also, very deliberately, understates the magnitude of the problem. And he takes lower estimates. He takes means. He doesn’t look at distributions. And he doesn’t look beyond the end of this century. So within that overall structural logical mistake, there are all kinds of subdiffusions of cooking the books along the way. It’s a kind I just described. Deliberately taking lower estimates, deliberately taking means and not looking at distributions, when this is a risk management problem, and deliberately curtailing the time period. I could go on. I mean, there’s mistake after mistake in there, including the discussions of discounting, in the context of a future that depends on what you do now in a very big way. Most of economics, when it discusses discounting, looks at some assumed growth path and thinks a little (inaudible) associated with investment projects around that path, which, again, is an analytical mistake of huge importance in this kind of context, when what the future looks like, including whether or not we’re better off, depends profoundly on what we do now.

So I could go on. But as I say, Bjørn tells a very good case, and he’s a very engaging guy, actually. You ought to listen to him, it’s worth going to, but just remember, he’s wrong.

The conservative story, as you portrayed it, is partly answered by what I’ve just said. Because implicit in the plausibility of that story is the notion that these effects down the track are not that big. So you’re saying, why should we give up what seems to be a lot now in return for something which, you know, is a bit uncertain and accrues to people who are going to be much richer, much richer than us? And more to the point they don’t have a vote.

Well, the answer to that is that you don’t have to give up that much now. And some of it looks very exciting and positive. I don’t want to say you don’t have to give up anything now. That would be wrong and misleading. You do have to invest now. But it has tremendous returns beyond simply the climate change story, which I described. So I think it’s very important to come back first with two things.

One is, that do you realize the magnitude of the changes that we’re potentially talking about here?

And secondly, point to the very positive parts of the story as well. But this is something which requires enormous leadership. When we gathered together as a world in 1944 at Bretton Woods, we had seen 30 years of global warfare and great depression. We could see, in a very direct way, what goes wrong if we don’t think ahead and we don’t collaborate. The evidence was, you know, in blood in very recent history.

This one, we’re having to say, look, this is actually much bigger, in many ways, than these World Wars and the Great Depression. But in 50 years, 100 years down the track, some things much earlier, but in terms of its big magnitude, this is a great test of rationality for human beings. It’s not simply that they can get scalded and say, getting scalded is not a good idea, I’ll avoid getting scalded. That’s the evolutionary approach to learning. This is a big challenge for us, in terms of rational human beings. We’ve got to anticipate this one. It doesn’t make it any less real. But it means it’s less real in terms of direct experience.

So that’s the great challenge for political leadership. That’s why communication is so important. That’s journalism communication is so important. I had a long discussion with Rahul Ghandi about how this can become a current political issue in India. In India, of all places, people understand the consequences of water, storms, floods, droughts. If ever there was a place in the world, no necessity to explain that to people, that they know. But it’s linking, linking that to action in India now, linking action in India now to what other people might do as a world. That’s the challenge of communication. I think it’s enormously important that we take that on.

JOANNE MYERS: I thank you really very much for bringing all of these issues to us today. They’re very important. And I want to thank you for making such a strong case. Thank you.

The Wall Isn’t Falling in Iran!

From the Newsweek Magazine  issue dated Jul 13, 2009.

Whenever we see the kinds of images that have been coming out of Iran over the past two weeks, we tend to think back to 1989 and Eastern Europe. That time, when people took to the streets and challenged their governments, those seemingly stable regimes proved to be hollow and quickly collapsed. What emerged was liberal democracy. Could Iran yet undergo its own velvet revolution?

It’s possible but unlikely. While the regime’s legitimacy has cracked-a fatal wound in the long run-for now it will probably be able to use its guns and money to consolidate power. And it has plenty of both. Remember, the price of oil was less than $20 a barrel back in 1989. It is currently $69. More important, as Zbigniew Brzezinski has pointed out, 1989 was highly unusual. As a historical precedent, it has not proved a useful guide to other antidictatorial movements.

The three most powerful forces in the modern world are democracy, religion, and national-ism. In 1989 in Eastern Europe, all three were arrayed against the ruling regimes. Citizens hated their governments because they deprived people of liberty and political participation. Believers despised communist leaders because they were atheistic, banning religion in countries where faith was deeply cherished. And people rejected their regimes because they were seen as having been imposed from the outside by a much–disliked imperial power, the Soviet Union.

The situation in Iran is more complex. Democracy clearly works against this repressive regime. The forces of religion, however, are not so easily aligned against it. Many, possibly most, Iranians appear to be fed up with theocracy. But that does not mean they are fed up with religion. It does appear that the more openly devout Iranians-the poor, the rural-voted for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

There is one way religion could be used against Iran’s leaders, but it would involve an unlikely scenario: were Iraq-based Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani to issue a fatwa condemning Tehran in any way, it would be a seismic event, probably resulting in the regime’s collapse. Remember, Sistani is Iranian, probably more revered in the entire Shia world than any other ayatollah, and he is opposed to the basic doctrine of velayat-e faqih that created the Islamic Republic of Iran. His own view is that clerics should not be involved in politics, which is why he has steered clear of any such role in Iraq. But he is unlikely to publicly criticize the Iranian regime. (He did, however, refuse to see Ahmadinejad when the latter visited Iraq in March 2008.)

Nationalism is the most complex of these three forces. Over most of its history, the Iranian regime has exploited nationalist sentiment. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini came to power by battling the shah, who was widely seen as an American puppet. Soon after the revolution, Iraq attacked Iran, and the mullahs wrapped themselves in the flag again. The United States supported Iraq in that war, ignoring Saddam Hussein’s use of chemical weapons against Iranians-something Iranians have never forgotten. Over the past eight years, the Bush administration’s veiled threats to attack Iran allowed the mullahs to drum up support. (Every Iranian dissident, from Akbar Ganji to Shirin Ebadi, has noted that talk of airstrikes on Iran strengthened the regime.) And it is worth remembering that the United States still funds guerrilla outfits and opposition groups that are trying to topple the Islamic Republic. Most of these are tiny groups with no chance of success, funded largely to appease right-wing congressmen.

But the Tehran government is able to portray this as an ongoing anti–Iranian campaign.

In this context, President Obama is quite right to tread cautiously, extend his moral support to Iranian protesters, but not get politically involved. The United States has always underestimated the raw power of nationalism across the world, always assuming that people will not be taken in by cheap and transparent appeals against foreign domination. But look at what is happening in Iraq right now, where Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki boasts that America’s troop withdrawals are a “a heroic repulsion of the foreign occupiers.” Of course Maliki would not be in office but for those occupying forces, who protect his government to this day. But he is a canny politician and knows what will appeal to the Iraqi people.

Ahmadinejad is also a politician with considerable mass appeal. And he is already accusing the United States and Britain of interference. Our strategy should be to make sure that these accusations seem as loony and baseless as possible. Were President Obama to be seen as grandstanding and taking ownership of the protest movement, he would be -helping Ahmadinejad’s strategy, not America’s.
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Fareed Zakaria was named editor of Newsweek International in October 2000, overseeing all Newsweek editions abroad. The magazine reaches an audience of 24 million worldwide.

Heart health at the tip of your finger
By Karin Kloosterman
July 01, 2009

 http://www.israel21c.org/bin/en.jsp?enDi…;

Whoopi Goldberg tried the EndoPAT heart test on her finger during a recent episode of The View and came out smiling. After 15 minutes, the Israeli developed device was able to give her heart a passing grade. At least for the next seven years.

Developed by Itamar Medical, an Israeli company traded on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, the EndoPAT has been popular not only with celebrities, but also gets a seal of approval from America’s doctors, and prestigious medical institutions like the Mayo Clinic.

Earning FDA status in 2003, the EndoPAT can measure the health of your heart using two small probes that hook up to each index finger. While there are other tests on the market like ultrasound tests to help clinicians assess if a patient has the early onset of heart disease, the EndoPAT looks further into the future — up to seven years, sensing whether or not your arteries are losing elasticity.

Like a blood pressure test on your finger

“The test I’m talking about - a 15 minute test - is a probe on the finger and basically it works the way you take blood pressure,” says Dr. Dov Reuven, the company’s CEO. “We do the same thing and measure the stress of the arteries in the fingertips.”

Used over 150,000 times in the US, the recent vote of confidence from the Mayo Clinic, which tested the EndoPAT on an independent study of healthy volunteers - part of the Framingham Heart Study — tells doctors that it’s a good addition to their toolkit for assessing heart disease.

“That’s the beauty of this. That’s why it is revolutionary,” Reuven tells ISRAEL21c. “The EnoPAT is the easiest detector of this disease. All other devices work within about one, two or three years. There is a test in the US that looks for carotid plaque. The point is once there is a buildup of plaque, it is too late in the cycle. A patient is not going to turn around that much. Ours can already see arteries that are less distensible.”

This means that people who may get a clean bill of health from doctors, can look deeper into their future, to know if they are at risk for heart attack seven years down the road. If you discover you are at risk, a regimen for improving health can be developed with a doctor. Changing one’s diet and exercise, or taking statins, may be a course of action.

Applications in understanding erectile problems

It also has become an interesting test for understanding erectile dysfunction, and can help a doctor decide whether or not to prescribe erection-enhancing drugs like Cialis, says Reuven.

The same device that tests for heart health can also tell urologists whether or not to prescribe medicine. “It could protect them from malpractice,” says Reuven.

Essentially, using this device doctors have a much better way now to control a patient’s health to determine if they are at risk of a heart attack. “The importance of the Mayo Clinic story is that today when you go to your physicians or cardiologist, they will ask you seven questions, or risk factors for heart disease, like cholesterol levels, if you smoke, or are overweight,” says Reuven.

Sometimes there are people who are considered completely low risk based on these basic questions, but nevertheless are at risk for heart disease. The study examined 240 people who are “specimens of health”, tacking them over time, and recording cardiac events, such as chest pains or heart attacks.

The efficacy of the test was confirmed by doctors at Mayo. The clinic writes: “Results of a Mayo Clinic study show that a simple, non-invasive finger sensor test is ‘highly predictive’ of a major cardiac event, such as a heart attack or stroke, for people who are considered at low or moderate risk, according to researchers.”

Mayo’s seal of approval

The device is now available at doctors’ clinics in the US, including the clinic of The View’shouse doctor Dr. Stephen Lamm.

Endorsing the product, Lamm says he uses it on every patient, translating to about 200 times a month.

On the show, Whoopi scored a 1.9, “and she was excited,” says Reuven. “The real truth is the arterial sclerosis process starts early on in life. This will become part of the screening and treatment process,” he adds, mentioning that China is taking a serious look at the device too. “They can’t afford heart bypasses and stents.”

The EndoPAT has applications in wellness and holistic medicine as a means to quantify if a treatment is working.

The company has a second device, a product that functions like a mini sleep lab used to detect the severity of sleep apnea. Called the WatchPAT it resembles a ski or diving watch. It removes the need for people to spend uncomfortable nights in a sleep lab.

Traded on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, the largest investor in Itamar Medical is Medtronic. The company employs about 160 people worldwide.

IRAN REGIME GAINING THE EDGE OVER PROTESTERS.
27 June 2009

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad smiles.

BY NAZILA FATHI and MICHAEL SLACKMAN

TEHRAN — The direct confrontation over Iran’s presidential election was effectively silenced Friday when the main opposition leader said he would seek permits for any future protests, an influential cleric suggested that leaders of the demonstrations could be executed, and the council responsible for validating the election repeated its declaration that there were no major irregularities.

Rather than address the underlying issues that led to the most sustained, unexpected challenge to the leadership since the 1979 revolution, the government pressed its effort to recast the entire conflict not as an internal dispute that brought millions of Iranians into the streets, but as one between Iran and outside agents from Europe, the United States and even Saudi Arabia.

It was a narrative that spoke both to the leadership’s belief that it had beaten back the popular outburst, and to the fragility of the calm. “There has been too much violence to forget about it,” said an expatriate Iranian analyst who is not being identified because he has relatives in Iran and is afraid of reprisals against them.

Although the government appeared to have the upper hand, political analysts said it was too soon for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to declare his troubles over. Though it seemed increasingly likely he would be sworn in for a second term by early August, there was no guarantee how that term would unfold or whether competitors within the system — who have a different vision of Iran — would work against him.

Even before he faced a challenge to his legitimacy, Mr. Ahmadinejad was often castigated by Parliament for his troubled handling of the economy, and there had been talk of trying to impeach him. Several of his ministers quit the government in protest over his economic policies. “There are quite a few people sitting on the fence watching to see which way the wind will blow,” said Ali M. Ansari, a professor of Iranian history at St. Andrews University in Scotland. “Information is very hard to come by, but there seems to be much back-room negotiating predicated on the fact normality should first return to the country.”

Throughout the crisis, events in Iran have focused on two camps: the opposition, led by Mir Hussein Moussavi, a former prime minister, and the camp surrounding Mr. Ahmadinejad, including the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and the military and security agencies. But there is a third group of more pragmatic military and security figures who have competed with Mr. Ahmadinejad but are believed to remain close to Ayatollah Khamenei.

Two of the most influential in that group are the mayor of Tehran, Mohammad Baqer Ghalibaf, a former commander in the Revolutionary Guards, and the speaker of Parliament, Ali Larijani, the nation’s former chief nuclear negotiator. Both ran for president four years ago and want to run again, and have at times been sharp critics of Mr. Ahmadinejad’s stewardship. Political analysts have described them as loyal to the leader and committed to Islamic government, but eager for a more modern state integrated with the rest of the world. Mr. Larijani resigned as nuclear negotiator in part because he favored engagement over confrontation.

During the electoral crisis both made statements demonstrating their independence from Mr. Ahmadinejad — and their objection to some aspects of the crackdown. The mayor called for allowing legal protests. The speaker said that it was improper for the Guardian Council, which is supposed to monitor the elections, to side with Mr. Ahmadinejad. Mr. Larijani also said that the majority of the people did not believe the government’s contention that Mr. Ahmadinejad had won with 63 percent of the vote.

“It’s an odd dynamic,” said Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “The person they have to be loyal to, the supreme leader, has thrown his weight behind this person they despise. Ghalibaf is one of these people, like Larijani, and others had been on the fence, and if there is a tipping point they could go the other way.”

The government continued to try to frame any opponents as traitors to the nation. The Friday Prayer ceremony is a political and religious ritual held in a large hall at Tehran University and broadcast all over the country. Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami, a stout, turbaned cleric who frequently delivers the Friday speech, hewed to the hard party line. He urged that those who led protests be convicted for taking up arms against people, an offense punishable by death.

“I want the judiciary to punish leading rioters firmly and without showing any mercy to teach everyone a lesson,” he said.

A few hours earlier, the Guardian Council repeated its claim that the election had been fair. “There has been no fraud in the election,” said the council’s spokesman, Abbas-Ali Kadkhodaei, acknowledging that the review process was not technically completed. He said the council had checked discrepancies reported by Mr. Moussavi, but that they had not borne out.

Mr. Moussavi immediately posted a report containing a long list of irregularities on his Web site, an action that barely registered against the might of the state machine. But he also signaled that the street phase of the protests was ending, saying on his Web site that he would try to seek permits for future protests — permits the government has consistently refused.

While protesters were aided at first by technology — primarily the Internet and text messaging — the government deployed its control of state television and news outlets to sweep away competing narratives.

“It is still possible that the information age will crack authoritarian structures in Iran,” wrote Jon B. Alterman, director of the Middle East program for the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “But it is far more likely that the government will be able to use that technology to secure its own rule.”

Mr. Moussavi may have little room to maneuver, but he has refused to surrender altogether. He is being closely monitored by security agents. Members of Parliament who are aligned with Ayatollah Khamenei met with Mr. Moussavi on Wednesday and tried to press him to relent.

“Mr. Moussavi still wants the election results nullified,” Ismail Kossari, one of the members of Parliament, told the ILNA news agency.

“We told him that his demand was unreasonable and immoral and he shouldn’t have repeated his demand after the supreme leader’s statements at the Friday prayers,” Mr. Kossari was quoted as saying.

Nazila Fathi reported from Tehran, and Michael Slackman from Cairo. Alan Cowell contributed reporting from Paris, Mona el-Naggar from Cairo, and Sharon Otterman from New York.

——————

IRAN: The End of the Beginning?

 http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/20…

BY TRITA PARSI, REZA ASLAN as published in foreignpoicy.com,  JUNE 26, 2009

Iran’s popular uprising, which began after the June 12 election, may be heading for a premature ending. In many ways, the Ahmadinejad government has succeeded in transforming what was a mass movement into dispersed pockets of unrest. Whatever is now left of this mass movement is now leaderless, unorganized — and under the risk of being hijacked by groups outside Iran in pursuit of their own political agendas.

In 1999, students in Iran demonstrated against the closing of reformist newspapers. The unrest lasted a few days and was brutally suppressed. The demonstrators were almost exclusively students. No other segments of society joined their ranks in any meaningful numbers. With their limited appeal to other segments of society, the demonstrators failed to grow in numbers and attain their political objectives.

The demonstrations following the Iranian election on June 12 share few if any characteristics of the student uprising of 1999. What we have witnessed taking place in Iran is a mass movement attracting supporters from all walks of life, all demographics, all classes, and even all political backgrounds. Even supporters of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have expressed discomfort with the developments in Iran, arguing that they voted for Ahmadinejad because they thought he would be a better president, and not because he would be a better dictator.

Indeed, the post-election demonstrations have neither been an uprising of intellectuals and students nor die-hard anti-regime elements from northern Tehran. Instead, the masses that poured in the streets included large numbers of people who often have been loyal to the Iranian government and who in many ways have a stake in its survival. (We can call them Iran’s political middle, or its swing voters.) This is precisely why this movement has constituted such a threat to the Iranian government — not once since 1979 has such an alliance of Iranians come together.

Knowing very well that the opposition’s ability to attract Iranians of all backgrounds constituted a major threat to the government, the Iranian authorities moved quickly to peel away layer after layer of people from the movement to reduce it to a much smaller and more manageable core of regime — not Ahmadinejad — opponents. The Ahmadinejad government’s tactics were predictable: It combined a most brutal clampdown on protesters with propaganda alleging that the opposition movement was orchestrated by foreign elements and exiled opposition groups.

The Mousavi camp sought to counteract these measures and retain its ability to attract a diverse array of Iranians by grounding its slogans and resistance in the language and symbolism of the revolution itself. Mousavi, in a direct challenge to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, presented himself and the movement as the guardians of the revolution, and protesters in the street recycled slogans from the 1979 era, including the chant “Allahu Akbar.”
Although successful at first, the discipline has clearly broken down. This should be no surprise — the movement is by now in effect leaderless. A source close to Mousavi says that the first and second circle of people around Mousavi have all been arrested or put under house arrest. Mousavi himself has limited ability to communicate with his team and his followers. The lack of leadership is visible on the streets, where demonstrators exhibit unparalleled will and courage, but lack direction and guidance.

Indeed, the lack of organization and execution is perhaps the most convincing evidence that the anti-Ahmadinejad movement is completely homegrown and void of any attempt to emulate the velvet revolutions of Central Asia and Eastern Europe. What is driving people to the streets is their sense of frustration and anger — not a well-devised plan and training in clever nonviolent resistance techniques.

The leadership vacuum does not bode well for the movement’s prospects of success, particularly when it comes to attracting those Iranian swing-voters to its side once more. And this creates openings for external meddling — just not the kind you think.

Exiled opposition groups, whose political agenda sharply differs from that of the protesters in Iran — indeed, many of these groups urged people not to vote in the elections — have sought to fill the vacuum left by a beheaded and directionless indigenous movement. Though the outrage of these exiled groups against the Iranian government’s brutal violence is genuine, their efforts to impose themselves on the political scene have caused great frustration among opposition elements inside Iran. At a time when the movement in Iran is paralyzed, efforts by exiled groups — groups that scorned the protesters only weeks ago for choosing to participate in the elections — to fill the leadership vacuum are viewed as nothing less than a maneuver to hijack the movement.

This is playing right into the hands of the Ahmadinejad government, precisely because it would weaken, if not eliminate, the indigenous movement’s trump card: its ability to attract the Iranian swing-voters back to its side. If the exiled opposition groups and their neo-conservative backers in the United States prevail in aiding the Ahmadinejad government, what started out as the largest Iranian mass movement since 1979 may end up as little more than the student demonstrations of 1999. Which is to say, an instance of hopes raised, then dashed.

Trita Parsi is president of the National Iranian American Council and author of Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran and the U.S. Reza Aslan is the author of How to Win a Cosmic War: God, Globalization, and the End of the War on Terror.
————-

Uri Avnery

27.6.09
  Between Tel Aviv and Tehran

HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of Iranian citizens pour into the streets in order to protest against their government! What a wonderful sight! Gideon Levy wrote in Haaretz that he envies the Iranians.

And indeed, anyone who tries these days to get Israelis in any numbers into the streets could die of envy. It is very difficult to get even hundreds of people to protest against the evil deeds or policies of our government – and not because everybody supports it. At the height of the war against Gaza, half a year ago, it was not easy to mobilize ten thousand protesters. Only once a year does the peace camp succeed in bringing a hundred thousand people to the square – and then only to commemorate the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin.

The atmosphere in Israel is a mixture of indifference, fatigue and a “loss of the belief in the ability to change reality”, as a Supreme Court justice put it this week. A very dramatic change is needed in order to get masses of people to demonstrate for peace.

FOR MIR-HOSSEIN MOUSAVI hundreds of thousands have demonstrated, and hundreds of thousands have demonstrated for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. That says something about the people and about the regime.

Can anyone imagine a hundred thousand people gathering in Cairo’s Tahrir Square to protest against the official election results? The police would open fire before a thousand had assembled there.

Would even a thousand people be allowed to demonstrate in Amman against His Majesty? The very idea is absurd.

Some years ago, the Saudi security forces in Mecca opened fire on unruly pilgrims. In Saudi Arabia, there are never protests against election results – simply because there are no elections.

In Iran, however, there are elections, and how! They are more frequent than elections in the US, and Iranian presidents change more often than American ones. Indeed, the very protests and riots show how seriously the citizens there treat election results.

OF COURSE, the Iranian regime is not democratic in the way we understand democracy. There is a Supreme Guide who fixes the rules of the game. Religious bodies rule out candidates they do not like. Parliament cannot adopt laws that contradict religious law. And the laws of God are unchangeable - at most, their interpretation can change.

All this is not entirely foreign to Israelis. From the very beginning the religious camp has been trying to turn Israel into a religious state, in which religious law (called Halakha) would be above the civil law. Laws “revealed” thousands of years ago and regarded as unchangeable would take precedence over laws enacted by the democratically elected Knesset.
To understand Iran, we have only to look at one of the important Israeli parties: Shas. They, too, have a Supreme Guide, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, who decides everything. He appoints the party leadership, he selects the party’s Knesset candidates, he directs the party faction how to vote on every single issue. There are no elections in Shas. And in comparison with the frequent outbursts of Rabbi Ovadia, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a model of moderation.

ELECTIONS DIFFER from country to country. It is very difficult to compare the fairness of elections in one country with those in another.

At one end of the scale were the elections in the good old Soviet Union. There it was joked that a voter entered the ballot room, received a closed envelope from an official and was politely requested to put it into the ballot box.
“What, can’t I know who I am voting for?” the voter demanded.

The official was shocked. “Of course not! In the Soviet Union we have secret elections!”

At the other end of the scale there should stand that bastion of democracy, the USA. But in elections there, only nine years ago, the results were decided by the Supreme Court. The losers, who had voted for Al Gore, are convinced to this very day that the results were fraudulent.

In Saudi Arabia, Syria, Jordan and now, apparently, also in Egypt, rule is passed from father to son or from brother to brother. A family affair.

Our own elections are clean, more or less, even if after every election people claim that in the Orthodox Jewish quarters the dead also voted. Three and a half million inhabitants of the occupied Palestinian territories also held democratic elections in 2006, which former President Jimmy Carter described as exemplary, but Israel, the US and Europe refused to accept the results, because they did not like them.
So it seems that democracy is a matter of geography.

WERE THE election results in Iran falsified? Practically no one of us – in Tel Aviv, Washington or London – can know. We have no idea, because none of us – and that includes the chiefs of all intelligence agencies – really knows what is happening in that country. We can only try to apply our common sense, based on the little information we have.
Clearly, hundreds of thousands of voters honestly believe that the results were faked. Otherwise, they would not have taken to the streets. But this is a quite normal among losers. During the intoxication of an election campaign, every party believes that it is about to win. When this does not happen, it is quite sure that the results are forged.
Some time ago, Germany’s excellent 3Sat television channel broadcast an arresting report about Tehran. The crew drove through the main street from the North of the city to the South, stopping frequently along the way, entering people’s homes, visiting mosques and nightclubs.

I learned that Tehran is largely similar to Tel Aviv at least in one respect: in the North there reside the rich and the well-to-do, in the South the poor and underprivileged. The Northerners imitate the US, go to prestigious universities and dance in the clubs. The women are liberated. The Southerners stick to tradition, revere the ayatollahs or the rabbis, and detest the shameless and corrupt North.

Mousavi is the candidate of the North, Ahmadinejad of the South. The villages and small towns – which we call the “periphery” – identify with the south and are alienated from the north.
In Tel Aviv, the South voted for Likud, Shas and the other right-wing parties. The North voted for Labor and Kadima. In our elections, a few months ago, the Right thus won a resounding victory.
It seems that something very similar happened in Iran. It is reasonable to assume that Ahmadinejad genuinely won.

The sole Western outfit that conducted a serious public opinion poll in Iran prior to the elections came up with figures that proved very close to the official results. It is hard to imagine huge forgeries, concerning many millions of votes, when thousands of polling station personnel are involved. In other words: it is entirely plausible that Ahmadinejad really won. If there were forgeries – and there is no reason to believe that there were not – they probably did not reach proportions that could sway the end result.

There is a simple test for the success of a revolution: has the revolutionary spirit penetrated the army? Since the French Revolution, no revolution has succeeded when the army was steadfast in support of the existing regime. Both the 1917 February and October revolutions in Russia succeeded because the army was in a state of dissolution. In 1918, much the same happened in Germany. Mussolini and Hitler took great pains not to challenge the army, and came to power with its support.

In many revolutions, the decisive moment arrives when the crowds in the street confront the soldiers and policemen, and the question arises: will they open fire on their own people? When the soldiers refuse, the revolution wins. When they shoot, that is the end of the matter.

When Boris Yeltsin climbed on the tank, the solders refused to shoot and he won. The Berlin wall fell because one East-German police officer refused at the decisive moment to give the order to open fire. In Iran, Khomeini won when, in the final test, the soldiers of the Shah refused to shoot. That did not happen this time. The security forces were ready to shoot. They were not infected by the revolutionary spirit. The way it looks now, that was the end of the affair.

I AM not an admirer of Ahmadinejad. Mousavi appeals to me much more.
I do not like leaders who are in direct contact with God, who make speeches to the masses from a balcony, who use demagogic and provocative language, who ride on the waves of hatred and fear. His denial of the holocaust – an idiotic exercise in itself – only adds to Ahmadinejad’s image as a primitive or cynical leader.

No doubt, he is a sworn enemy of the state of Israel or – as he prefers to call it – the “Zionist regime”. Even if he did not promise to wipe it out himself, as erroneously reported, but only expressed his belief that it would “disappear from the map”, this does not set my mind at rest.

It is an open question whether Mousavi, if elected, would have made a difference as far as we are concerned. Would Iran have abandoned its efforts to produce nuclear weapons? Would it have reduced its support of the Palestinian resistance? The answer is negative.

It is an open secret that our leaders hoped that Ahmadinejad would win, exacerbate the hatred of the Western world against himself and make reconciliation with America more difficult.

All through the crisis, Barack Obama has behaved with admirable restraint. American and Western public opinion, as well as the supporters of the Israeli government, called upon him to raise his voice, identify with the protesters, wear a green tie in their honor, condemn the Ayatollahs and Ahmadinejad in no uncertain terms. But except for minimal criticism, he did not do so, displaying both wisdom and political courage.

Iran is what it is. The US must negotiate with it, for its own sake and for our sake, too. Only this way – if at all – is it possible to prevent or hold up its development of nuclear weapons. And if we are condemned to live under the shadow of an Iranian nuclear bomb, in a classic situation of a balance of terror, it would be better if the bomb were in the hands of an Iranian leadership that keeps up a dialogue with the American president. And of course, it would be good for us if - before reaching that point - we could achieve, with the friendly support of Obama, full peace with the Palestinian people, thus removing the main justification for Iran’s hostility towards Israel.
The revolt of the Northerners in Iran will remain, so it seems, a passing episode. It may, hopefully, have an impact in the long run, beneath the surface. But in the meantime, it makes no sense to deny the victory of the Iranian denier.

The Neda or the “Iran Libre” - the new non-alcoholic green drink of choice.

It is non alcoholic in deference to the Islamic people.

It is based on cool mint and lime juice tamed with some black chocolate syrup and strawberry pulp.

The latter two in memory of old United States and its new President.

Garnish with a rim of salt and in major bars, like the Delegates’ Bar at the UN, with glass hang-ons of two lions - the Iranian lion and the British lion.

Drink when discussing Climate Change and Green Energy Policy.

 In 1953 Iran lost its one shot at real democracy thanks to the US CIA. Later on Iran lost one million people on the hands of  a US sanctioned Saddam Hussein attack - now the Iranian government blames their old enemies while beating their own people. They also blame British nationals - but these days the real blame - honestly - is on all of us - this because we allow funds to flow to the coffers of the Iranian government - then wonder what makes them tick?

How long will it still take to recognize not just the miserable US history in Iran, which finally was recognized as such by President Obama, but also the fact that behind the CIA and the decision makers in the US Department of State - and in the White House itself - was that forced dependency on oil - engineered by self serving oil interests that had and still have a strangle hold on US policy. That is what set up the CIA and the others to do exactly what they did.

The memory of Neda Agha-Soltan deserves better from us - it deserves a good GREEN LAW in the United States - the kind of law that will help us fight our addiction to oil and thus retire the batton wielding and gun shooting goons of Tehran.

————–

NEW YORK TIMES OP-ED COLUMNIST
The Green Revolution(s)

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: June 23, 2009

There has been a lot of worthless chatter about what President Barack Obama should say about Iran’s incipient “Green Revolution.” Sorry, but Iranian reformers don’t need our praise. They need the one thing we could do, without firing a shot, that would truly weaken the Iranian theocrats and force them to unshackle their people. What’s that? End our addiction to the oil that funds Iran’s Islamic dictatorship. Launching a real Green Revolution in America would be the best way to support the “Green Revolution” in Iran.

Oil is the magic potion that enables Iran’s turbaned shahs — “Shah Khamenei” and “Shah Ahmadinejad” — to snub their noses at the world and at many of their own people as well. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad behaves like someone who was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple. By coincidence, he’s been president of Iran during a period of record high oil prices. So, although he presides over an economy that makes nothing the world wants, he can lecture us about how the West is in decline and the Holocaust was a “myth.” Trust me, at $25 a barrel, he won’t be declaring that the Holocaust was a myth anymore.

The Obama team wants to pursue talks with Iran over its nuclear program, no matter who wins there. Fine. But the issue is not talk or no talk. The issue is leverage or no leverage. I love talking to people — especially in the Middle East — on one condition: that we have the leverage. As long as oil prices are high, Iran will have too much leverage and will be able to resist concessions on its nuclear program. With oil at $70 a barrel, our economic sanctions on Iran are an annoyance; at $25, they really hurt.

“People do not change when you tell them they should; they change when they tell themselves they must,” observed Michael Mandelbaum, the Johns Hopkins University foreign policy specialist. And nothing would tell Iran’s leaders that they must change more than collapsing oil prices.

* * * * *

Mr. Obama has already started some excellent energy-saving initiatives. But we need more. Imposing an immediate “Freedom Tax” of $1 a gallon on gasoline — with rebates to the poor and elderly — would be a triple positive: It would stimulate more investment in renewable energy now; it would stimulate more consumer demand for the energy-efficient vehicles that the reborn General Motors and Chrysler are supposed to make; and, it would reduce our oil imports in a way that would surely affect the global price and weaken every petro-dictator.

That is how — as Bill Maher likes to say — we make the bad guys “fight all of us.”

Sure, it would take time to influence the regime, but, unlike words alone, it will have an impact. I believe in “The First Law of Petro-Politics,” which stipulates that the price of oil and the pace of freedom in petrolist states — states totally dependent on oil exports to run their economies — operate in an inverse correlation. As the price of oil goes down, the pace of freedom goes up because leaders have to educate and unleash their people to innovate and trade. As the price of oil goes up, the pace of freedom goes down because leaders just have to stick a pipe in the ground to stay in power.

Exhibit A: the Soviet Union. High oil prices in the 1970s suckered the Kremlin into propping up inefficient industries, overextending subsidies, postponing real economic reforms and invading Afghanistan. When oil prices collapsed to $15 a barrel in the late 1980s, the overextended, petrified Soviet Empire went bust.

In a 2006 speech entitled “The Collapse of an Empire: Lessons for Modern Russia,” Yegor Gaidar, a deputy prime minister of Russia in the early 1990s, noted that “the timeline of the collapse of the Soviet Union can be traced to Sept. 13, 1985. On this date, Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the minister of oil of Saudi Arabia, declared that the monarchy had decided to alter its oil policy radically. The Saudis stopped protecting oil prices, and Saudi Arabia quickly regained its share in the world market.

If we could bring down the price of oil, the Islamic Republic — which has been buying off its people with subsidies and jobs for years — would face the same pressures. The ayatollahs would either have to start taking subsidies away from Iranians, which would only make the turbaned shahs more unpopular, or empower Iran’s human talent — men and women — and give them free access to the learning, science, trade and collaboration with the rest of the world that would enable this once great Persian civilization to thrive without oil.

Let’s get serious: An American Green Revolution to end our oil addiction — to parallel Iran’s Green Revolution to end its theocracy — helps us, helps them and raises the odds that whoever wins the contest for power, there will have to be a reformer. What are we waiting for?

 We got the following in an e-mail and we are still trying to figure out if this could be the answer that the UN Summit on finances and the economy will be looking for at the June 23-25, 2009 meetings that are being led with the help of a document prepared by Professor Stiglitz.

———

It is August. In a small town on the South Coast of France, holiday season is in full swing, but it is raining so there is not too much business happening.
Everyone is heavily in debt.

Luckily, a rich Russian tourist arrives in the foyer of the small local hotel.
He asks for a room and puts a Euro100 note on the reception counter, takes a key and goes to inspect the room located up the stairs on the third floor.

The hotel owner takes the banknote in a hurry and rushes to his meat supplier to whom he owes E100.
The butcher takes the money and races to his supplier to pay his debt.
The wholesaler rushes to the farmer to pay E100 for pigs he purchased some time ago.
The farmer triumphantly gives the E100 note to a local prostitute who gave him her services on credit.
The prostitute goes quickly to the hotel owner, as she owed the hotel E100 for her hourly room use to entertain clients.

At that moment, the rich Russian is coming down to the reception and informs the hotel owner that the proposed room is unsatisfactory and takes his E100 back and departs.

There was no profit or income.
But everyone no longer has any debt and the small townspeople look optimistically towards their future.

COULD THIS BE THE SOLUTION TO THE Global Financial Crisis? Or, is there a catch here?

Why Condemn Israel But Not Iranian Government Brutality? - Ben Caspit and Ben-Dror Yemini, Maariv.

Where did all the people who demonstrated against Israel disappear to? Now of all times, when the Basij hooligans have begun to slaughter innocent civilians in the city squares of Tehran?

How can it be that when a Jew kills a Muslim, the entire world boils, and when extremist Islam slaughters its citizens, the world is silent? Imagine that this were not happening now in Tehran but in the West Bank. Policemen on motorcycles butchering demonstrators. A young woman downed by a sniper, dying before the cameras.

If there is a truly free world, let it appear immediately and impose sanctions on those who slaughter their own people.

There is a different Islam, even in Iran. There are millions of Muslims who support freedom, human rights, equality for women. These millions loathe Khamenei, Chavez and Nasrallah too. (Maariv-Hebrew)

——————-

That is what we say - get the UN leaders take real measures. Do not wait for the impossible consesus but tell UN’s 38th floor that they do not earn their salaries and pomp if they do not show they have any guts. Mr. ban Ki-moon - this means you!

 While the US President and the British Prime Minister must be very careful what they do about the Iranian scene - this because their position could lead to further blood-shedding of innocent Iranians - and because both countries have a history of past activities in Iran. But what does the UN Secretary General stand for? His position, the way he handles himself, is no threat to the Iranian thugs, he never stood in their way and his utterances today are less then insignificant. Would his claim to World leadership not command him to speak up - by himself - and call the UN to action - any action - rather then just for contemplation? Has he read theUN dictum passed under the aegis of his predecessor THAT THERE IS A RESPONSIBILITY TO PROTECT in the armory of the UN body?

Could he not at least suggest to shine this weapon by saying at least that the UN should consider at least removing temporarily at least the full membership of Iran if it does not take immediate consideration of its responsibility to its own people?

UN DAILY NEWS from the
UNITED NATIONS NEWS SERVICE
22 June, 2009 =========================================================================

BAN URGES END TO ARRESTS, USE OF FORCE AMID POST-ELECTION VIOLENCE IN IRAN

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon today urged an immediate end to the arrests, threats and use of force taking place in Iran amid the post-election violence that has already claimed a number of lives.

Media reports say nearly 20 people have died in the unrest that has followed the 12 June presidential polls. Opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi has contested the results of the vote, which he says was fixed in favour of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Mr. Ban “is dismayed by the post-election violence, particularly the use of force against civilians, which has led to the loss of life and injuries,” his spokesperson said in a statement.

“He urges an immediate stop to the arrests, threats and use of force,” the statement added.

The Secretary-General called on the authorities to respect fundamental civil and political rights, especially the freedom of expression, freedom of assembly and freedom of information.

He also called on the Government and the opposition to peacefully resolve their differences through dialogue and legal means, and reiterated his hope that the democratic will of the people of Iran will be fully respected.

Last week, the United Nations human rights chief, Navi Pillay, voiced concern over reports of the use of excessive force and violence, as well as rising numbers of potentially extralegal arrests in the post-election period.

———-

As Sri Lanka Arrests Two UN Staff, UNHCR Offers Praise After Staying Silent.

Byline: Matthew Russell Lee of Inner City Press at the UN: News Analysis

UNITED NATIONS, June 19 — Two UN staff members were disappeared by the Sri Lankan government six days ago in Vavuniya. For days, the UN said nothing. An e-mail was sent to Inner City Press, along with a photo of UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon meeting with the staff in Vavuniya on May 23. Those disappeared served as drivers for the UN Office of Project Services and UNHCR, the UN’s refugee agency.

After some inquiries, the UN belatedly announced that two staff had been arrested, leading to short articles in the Indian and Canadian press, neither of which included the staff members’ names. They are Kandasamy “Saundi” Saundrarajan of UNOPS and N. Charles Raveendran of UNHCR. They are Tamils.

Meanwhile UNHCR’s country officer for Sri Lanka Amin Awar continued to praise the government and the internment camps in Vavuniya. While in Sri Lanka in May, Inner City Press published a story about another UNHCR staffer, detained by the government since last year.

Amin Awar, who had not responded to an emailed request to comment on the case, approached this reporter in the lobby of the Colombo Hilton on May 23 and argued that the court system in Sri Lanka is complex, but said he was advocating for the detained man.

No update has been provided, and now two more staffers, including one from UNHCR, are detained. How much more will the UN put up with, or as some say, cover up?

The email, lightly edited, is below.

UN’s Ban and Vavuniya staff, standing up for them not shown

Subj: 2 UN Staff abducted 4 days ago and now believed to be tortured by Sri Lankan Army Military Intelligence - Pls Help to Release them

From: [Name withheld for fear of retaliation or worse]
To: Matthew.Lee [at] innercitypress.com
Sent: 6/19/2009

Dear Matthew,

We write this email in desperation seeking your help to put more pressure on Sri Lankan Authorities and release 2 United Nations Staff ( I from UNOPS and 1 from UNHCR ) abducted by Sri Lankan Army Military Intelligence Officials in Vavuniya four days ago and currently detained. We have tried all the possible escalations within UN, including an urgent message to our Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon but nothing has helped so far.

We reliably learn that they are now being detained and tortured at a Sri Lankan Army Military Intelligence interrogation camp in Kurumankadu, Vavuniya and since it is weekend no one is taking it serious & taking some bold action for their release or access to them & ensure they are safe.

In our May30th Sit Report, our ground officers have highlighted the wide spread abductions and accounted for more than 13,310 missing people in Vavuniya IDP Camps, compared to the previous count. But our higher management in Colombo and Geneva has decided to downplay it and reported it as, “decrease is associated with double counting. Additional verification is required”. They never initiated a project for additional verification. Now we feel the pain of abduction when two of our colleagues are abducted.

Photo of our Vavuniya UN Team Group Photo with Secretary General Ban Ki-moon when he visited Vavuniya last month, attached.

We don’t know when we will see our colleagues again and the same smile … please help.

Due to security issues we cant talk on phone and sending this email with great difficulty & hope you will understand it.

Thanks in advance.

Concerned UN Staff, Sri Lanka

* * * * * *
In Sri Lanka Camps, UN Blind and Deaf Without Cameras or Cell Phones, African Concern.

Byline: Matthew Russell Lee of Inner City Press at the UN: News Analysis

UNITED NATIONS, June 19 –While it has been reported that in the UN-funded internment camps in Sri Lanka “UN officials have been stopped from bringing in cameras and mobile phones,” the Spokesperson for Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on Friday told Inner City Press, “I don’t think the UN would accept that.”

Since the UN did accept the detention by the government of UN staff earlier this year, it is not clear if the UN would accept being barred from exposing abuses they see in the camps or even photographing them. The Spokesperson said she would check. We’ll be waiting.

Despite these reported restrictions the UN’s top humanitarian John Holmes, who has yet to respond to requests for comment on the government killing off its investigation into the murder of 17 Action Contre La Faim aid workers, is quoted that “We do have pretty much full access to those camps at the moment.”

Would that be, access without cell phones or cameras? What does OCHA do when it becomes aware of abuses? It claimed that it advocated quietly about its detained staff. But the government said the issue was only raised once it was publicly asked about by the Press at the UN.

UN’s Ban speaks with envoy Fowler, kidnapped in Niger, on cell phone not seen in Sri Lanka

At a UN reception Friday day on the topic of sickle-cell anemia, several African Ambassadors expressed to Inner City Press their concern for what has happened this year in Sri Lanka. An Ambassador from the Maghreb asked, whatever happened to the Responsibility to Protect? Before that final push, shouldn’t somebody have stopped it?

Another referred to reports that LTTE officials who tried to surrender by waving the white flag, after communications via UN envoy Vijay Nambiar, had reportedly been shot and killed. “That is not good,” said the outgoing Permanent Representative of a country that itself suffered a genocide. Ironically, these African Ambassadors who are portrayed as more callous than their Western counterparts appear more genuinely concerned. But politics has dictated what has happened, and what is happening. Watch this site.

THE HEROINES OF IRAN
By MAUREEN CALLAHAN

To the iconography of revolution — the man in front of the tank in Tiananmen Square, young people ripping shards off the Berlin Wall — we can now add this: the red nail polish, black eyeliner and side-swept bangs of young Iranian women.
So…

full story: http://www.nypost.com/seven/06212009/pos…
–

40 MORE DAYS OF UNREST
By AMIR TAHERI

Tehran was the scene of hit-and-run battles between crowds of demonstrators and pro-regime vigilantes armed with knives and chains while a wave of arrests continued throughout the country.
Twenty-four hours after the “Supreme Guide”…

full story: http://www.nypost.com/seven/06212009/pos…
–

 more conventional reporting looks at the events in Iran still in its “in parallel” Moussavi blinders, but it seems that in fact, many of the protesting youth have already moved beyond Moussavi and ask rather for their own personal dignity and perhapse also for a better standing of Iran among the nations.

Mousavi Calls for Purge of “Lies.”
Sunday 21 June 2009
by: Parisa Hafezi  |  Visit article original @ Reuters

Tehran - Opposition leader Mirhossein Mousavi said the Islamic Republic must be purged of what he called lies and dishonesty, sending out a direct challenge to conservative rulers after a day of unrest across Tehran.

State television aired interviews with critics of the protests, urging Iranians to unite behind the government and suggesting only the West gained from Iran’s troubles.

(EDITORS’ NOTE: Reuters and other foreign media are subject to Iranian restrictions on their ability to report, film or take pictures in Tehran.)

Helicopters criss-crossed the city and ambulance sirens wailed into the night after streets emptied of protesters who had defied Friday’s stern warning from Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei against further demonstrations.

Riot police had deployed in force, firing teargas, using batons and water cannon to disperse groups of several hundred Iranians who had gathered across the city. There were fears of further violence on Sunday in the country, a major oil and gas producer.

Government restrictions prevent correspondents working for foreign media attending demonstrations to report, and the scale of any injuries or arrests was unclear.

Mousavi, focus of the biggest protests since the Islamic Revolution ousted the U.S.-backed Shah in 1979, said June 12 elections that delivered an overwhelming victory to hardline anti-Western President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad were fraudulent and must be annulled. He said the fraud was months in the planning.

Mousavi, who claims victory in the poll, told supporters he was “ready for martyrdom,” according to an ally. But he said he did not seek confrontation with the authorities.

“We are not against the Islamic system and its laws but against lies and deviations and just want to reform it,” he said in a statement posted on his website at the end of a tumultuous day.

He said if authorities refused to allow peaceful protests they would face the “consequences” - an apparent rejoinder to Khamenei’s warning that opposition leaders would be held responsible for any bloodshed resulting from protests.

“The people expect from their officials honesty and decency as many of our problems are because of lies … The Islamic revolution should be the way it was and the way it should be,” Mousavi said.

“Listen to the Leader”

State television said rioters smashed windows of banks and burned buses. They also aired interviews with people critical of the demonstrations that have racked Iran since the announcement of the election results on June 13.

“We all should listen to our leader (Khamenei) and preserve calm,” said one unnamed woman, aged around 40. “Otherwise we will make our enemies (the West) happy.”

Mousavi is himself a product of the Islamic establishment that has dominated Iran since 1979 and the robes of regime opponent may sit uneasily on his shoulders. But the demonstrations of the last week, swelling to hundreds of thousands, appear to have acquired a powerful momentum.

Beyond the violent confrontations with police, it was a day fraught with symbolism for the Islamic Republic.

A suicide bomber blew himself up at the mausoleum of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, police and state media said - an attack likely to stir passions in a country where the father of the Islamic revolution is deeply revered. The identity of the bomber was not known.

Another reminder of 1979 came as darkness fell, when supporters of Mousavi sent cries of Allahu Akbar (God is greatest) echoing across the rooftops.

United States President Barack Obama, in the forefront of diplomatic efforts to halt an Iranian nuclear program the West fears could yield atomic weapons, urged Tehran to “stop all violent and unjust actions against its own people.”

“The Iranian government must understand that the world is watching. We mourn each and every innocent life that is lost,” Obama said in a statement.

Iran’s highest legislative body said it was ready to recount a random 10 percent of the votes cast in the election to meet the complaints of Mousavi and two other candidates.

————–

IRAN’S PARLIAMENTARY SPEAKER IMPLIES ELECTION AUTHORITY SIDED WITH ONE CANDIDATE
Iran Demonstrators Sprayed 2  http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?et=1102617640915&a…]

The public rift among Iranian leaders widened Sunday when the country’s foreign
minister disputed allegations of ballot irregularities even as the parliamentary
speaker implied that the election authority had sided with one candidate.
“Although the Guardian Council is made up of religious individuals, I wish certain
members would not side with a certain presidential candidate,” Iran’s influential
parliamentary speaker, Ali Larijani, told the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting
without naming whom he meant.

HELP SAVE THE EARTH, TIME TO SUBSITUTE HEMP FOR OIL
By Dara Colwell, AlterNet
Every man-made fiber we wear, sit on, cook with, drive in,
are by-products of the petroleum industry — all of which
could be replaced by hemp.
 http://www.alternet.org/water/140739/hel…

EATING MEAT IS NOT NATURAL
By Kathy Freston, AlterNet
Eating meat is a relatively recent phenomenon in human
evolution. And our bodies have never adapted to it.
 http://www.alternet.org/story/140643/eat…

The Labor Unions’ Mafia-style Negotiations Threaten the Green Economy in California and the politics of a Blue-Green Shotgun Marriage may undo the Obama plans. New York Times’ Business Day of June 19, 2009 lifts the veil on these matters.

 A Move to Put the Union Label on Solar Power Plants

BrightSource Energy, which built a solar generating complex in the Negev Desert in Israel, above, has similar plans for California and with the application some serious problems surfaced - clearly not of this company’s making.

By TODD WOODY
Published: June 18, 2009, revised June 20, 2009.

SACRAMENTO — When a company called Ausra filed plans for a big solar power plant in California, it was deluged with demands from a union group that it study the effect on creatures like the short-nosed kangaroo rat and the ferruginous hawk. By contrast, when a competitor, BrightSource Energy, filed plans for an even bigger solar plant that would affect the imperiled desert tortoise, the same union group, California Unions for Reliable Energy, raised no complaint. Instead, it urged regulators to approve the project as quickly as possible.

One big difference between the projects? Ausra had rejected demands that it use only union workers to build its solar farm, while BrightSource pledged to hire labor-friendly contractors.

As California moves to license dozens of huge solar power plants to meet the state’s renewable energy goals, some developers contend they are being pressured to sign agreements pledging to use union labor. If they refuse, they say, they can count on the union group to demand costly environmental studies and deliver hostile testimony at public hearings.

If they commit at the outset to use union labor, they say, the environmental objections never materialize.

“This does stress the limits of credibility to some extent,” a California energy commissioner, Jeffrey Byron, said at one contentious hearing, “when an attorney representing a labor union is so focused on the potential impact of a solar power plant on birds.”

Union leaders acknowledge that they make aggressive use of the environmental laws, but say they do it out of genuine concern for the sustainability of California’s power industry, not just as a negotiating tactic. And they contend they do not abandon valid environmental objections to a project just because a company signs a labor agreement.

“We’ve been tarred and feathered more than once on this issue,” said Marc Joseph, a lawyer for California Unions for Reliable Energy. “We don’t walk away from environmental issues.”

At proposed fossil-fuel power plants, the union group has long been accused of exploiting environmental laws to force companies into signing labor agreements. The tactic is a subject of perennial discussion in the California legislature, which has considered, but never passed, bills to strip labor of its right to participate in environmental assessments.

What is new is that California Unions for Reliable Energy, a coalition of construction unions, appears to be applying this approach to new-age renewable energy projects, especially solar power plants, which are being fast-tracked to help meet the state’s green power target.

Lawyers for the union both negotiate labor agreements with solar developers and participate in the environmental review of the projects.

California Unions for Reliable Energy insists it is pursuing the long-term interests of its members. If energy projects are held to high environmental standards, the group says, more of them will ultimately get built, and that will mean more union jobs.

Nationwide, as billions of dollars in public and private investment flow to renewable energy projects, the environmental and labor battles being fought in California could prove to be the opening skirmishes of a larger fight over the emerging green economy.

Should Rust Belt factories converted to making solar components and wind turbines be union shops, gateways to the middle-class for a new generation of workers in the green economy? Or will the green economy look more like the service economy, with low-paid employees installing rooftop solar panels and retrofitting buildings?

For the labor movement, green jobs represent an opportunity to regain relevance after years of declining membership.

“Unions are trying to get a foothold in solar, wind and other new green occupations,” said Philip Mattera, research director for Good Jobs First, a labor-oriented research group in Washington.

“We’re at a turning point that will have an impact on the future of the whole economy, and a lot of unions are gearing up.”

But skeptics fear that union control of renewable energy projects will saddle the nascent industry with high costs and undermine its competitiveness.

“These environmental challenges are the unions’ major tactic to maintain their share of industrial construction — we call it greenmail,” said Kevin Dayton, state government affairs director for the Associated Builders and Contractors of California. “The future of solar energy is jeopardized by these unions holding up construction.”


In California, project labor agreements can raise costs on a project by about 20 percent, Mr. Dayton estimated.

The fights of the moment center on solar farms proposed for tens of thousands of acres of desert and agricultural land.

When the utility giant the FPL Group ignored entreaties from California Unions for Reliable Energy to use union labor on a planned 250-megawatt solar farm, it was hit with 144 data requests, demanding details on things like “the engine brand, model, and horsepower rating” of a water pump engine, “the number of man-hours devoted to focused tortoise surveys, by location” and “the role of each individual that participated.”

In filings with the California Energy Commission, Ausra has accused the union group of abusing environmental laws in a bid to extract a labor agreement. FPL’s lawyers accused the group of trying to stall the company’s solar project.

Bob Balgenorth, chairman of the labor group, makes no apologies for pushing hard for union jobs from solar developers while scrutinizing the environmental impact of the projects. “You only have so much land that can accept solar power plants,” said Mr. Balgenorth, who has cultivated strong ties with conservation groups.

“So the question is, should that land be used for low-paid jobs or should that land be used for high-paid jobs?”

Some solar developers say that signing a labor agreement is simply an unavoidable cost of doing business.

“Let’s just say that it is clear to us from experience that if we do not enter into a project labor agreement, the costs and schedule of the project is interminable,” said Douglas Wert, chief executive of Spinnaker Energy, a San Diego company hired to build two solar farms for Portuguese developer Martifer.

After Stirling Energy Systems filed plans with California regulators to install 30,000 solar dishes on 10 square miles of desert land, its executives got a call from Mr. Joseph, the union lawyer. Sean Gallagher, a vice president for Tessera Solar, the development arm for Stirling, said the company declined Mr. Joseph’s request to commit to using union labor.

California Unions for Reliable Energy subsequently filed 143 data requests with the company on the final day such requests could be made, and later intervened in a second, 850-megawatt Stirling solar project.

It was a different story after BrightSource Energy pledged to hire union-friendly contractors to build its Mojave Desert solar power plant complex. Despite questions raised by environmental groups about the project’s impact on wildlife, the union group took no action, according to commission documents.

Mr. Joseph said that the labor group wants to mediate between environmentalists and BrightSource, which is based in Oakland, Calif.

“We’re actually hoping that we can help resolve these issues in a way that allows that project to go forward and gives maximum protection to the desert tortoise,” he said.

He said he sees “absolutely no conflict of interest” in seeking labor agreements from solar developers while challenging the environmental effect of the projects. “It is in the interest of construction workers to have good middle class jobs — and to have conventional and renewable power plants that are sustainable,” Mr. Joseph said.

The union group’s strategy drew plaudits from environmentalists when the group was winning agreements from developers to cut pollution from fossil fuel power plants. But as some conservation groups ally themselves with business interests to push for a rapid rollout of renewable energy, strains are showing in the so-called blue-green alliance.

Some environmental groups are worried that the labor tactics will delay green energy projects and cause a backlash, but they are reluctant to go public with criticisms of the labor movement.

Others, like the Natural Resources Defense Council, are trying to steer clear of the controversy.

The council “hasn’t taken a position on whether union labor should or shouldn’t be used in these projects,” said Sheryl Carter, the group’s co-director of energy programs.

And still others defend the labor group’s role.

Carl Zichella, the Sierra Club’s director of western renewable programs, said California Unions for Reliable Energy had been effective at extracting concessions that aid the environment.

“It’s not a warm fuzzy thing they are doing; it’s a very self-interested thing they’re doing,” he said. “But it has a large ancillary public benefit.”


The article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: June 20, 2009
Because of an editing error, an article on Friday about union efforts to gain a foothold in green energy projects misstated the title of Jeffrey Byron, who questioned union motives in objecting to some projects on environmental grounds. He is one of five members of the California Energy Commission; he is not “the California energy commissioner.”

 Ahmadi-Nejad has not only stabbed in the back his own people, but the Palestinians as well. The big winner will turn out to be Prime Minister Netanyahu who wrote on his political flag that if you want to tackle the problems in the Islamic World you must start with  denuclearizing Iran first. The Arab States, not just President Obama, will now reconsider their own positions.

IRAN EXPOSED
The Jewish Week, June 19, 2009
by The Editors, http://www.thejewishweek.com/viewArticle…

In a perverse way, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s overwhelming, and reportedly stolen, re-election as president of Iran in recent days is good news for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and others who have warned of the dangers of a nuclear Tehran.

A victory by Mir Hussein Moussavi, the leading contender and apparent winner, would have tamped down concerns that Iran was a serious threat to Israel, the Mideast and the free world. Moussavi, a leader of the Islamic revolt 30 years ago, is far from a progressive, and he is opposed to the existence of Israel. But he supported dialogue with — rather than demonization of — the West, and called Ahmadinejad’s questioning of the veracity of the Holocaust irrational.

Now, though, Ahmadinejad, who repeatedly
has called for the elimination of the Jewish state, is seen as more firmly entrenched as a leader of his country, supported by the supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, whose word is final.
The Obama administration, eager to initiate dialogue with Iran after three decades without diplomatic contact, finds the outcome of Friday’s election sobering. No one in Washington appears ready to call for talks at this point. Even those who have been outspoken in asserting that Iran is not the menace Netanyahu and others say it is are expressing second thoughts. Writing from Tehran, New York Times columnist Roger Cohen, who has said that demonizing Ahmadinejad and the leaders of Iran is inaccurate and counterproductive, reported Monday: “I erred in underestimating the brutality and cynicism of a regime that understands the uses of ruthlessness.” He added that “President Obama’s outreach must now await a decent interval.”

Netanyahu has been calling on the Western world to wake up to the dangers of Iran. His efforts seems to have had limited impact in Washington, where the immediate foreign policy focus is on Afghanistan and Pakistan. But leaders of key Arab states like Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan don’t have to be convinced. Israeli President Shimon Peres told journalist Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic Monthly that “for the first time, the majority of the Arab world thinks that Iran is the real danger, not Israel.” (Goldberg, in the current issue of The Atlantic, points out the logic and opportunity of an alliance between Israel and Sunni-controlled Arab states to oppose the theocracy of Persian Iran, which is Shi’ite.)

The situation in Iran this week appears fluid, and combustible. But what is clear is that whoever is president in Tehran is subject to the leadership of a regime that has bared its teeth for all the world to see. No longer can the threat to regional stability of a nuclear Iran be discounted. And there are no more excuses for fooling ourselves into thinking that dialogue is the only answer. It may still be worth pursuing, but focus must turn to what happens if and when diplomacy fails.

—————–

VIOLENCE IN IRAN - POLICE BEAT BACK PROTESTORS - DEMONSTRATORS LIGHT FIRE NEAR IRANIAN PRESIDENT HEADQUARTERS
20 June 2009

An image taken from amateur video posted online from Tehran, Thursday, June 20, 2009, shows supporters of opposition leader Mir Hossien Mousavi protesting in Tehran . Eyewitnesses described fierce clashes after some 3,000 protesters, many wearing black, chanted ‘Death to the dictator!’ and ‘Death to dictatorship!’ near Revolution Square in downtown Tehran. Police fired tear gas, water cannons and guns but it was not clear if they were firing live ammunition.

BY ROBERT F. WORTH

TEHRAN — Police officers used tear gas and water cannons to beat back thousands of demonstrators gathering in the capital on Saturday, a day after Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said there would be “bloodshed” if street protests continued over the disputed presidential election.

Supporters of defeated election candidate Mirhossein Mousavi have reportedly lit a fire at the headquarters of the Iranian president’s backers in Tehran.

Police have fired shots in the air to prevent clashes between those who favour pro-reformer Mr Mousavi and those who support hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, witnesses say.

At least two persons are thought to have been hurt in the gunfire.

The violence unfolded on a day of extraordinary tension across Iran, as opposition protesters swore to continue pressing their claims of a stolen election against Iran’s embattled and increasingly impatient clerical leadership. Iran’s divisions played out on the streets. Regular security forces stood back and calmly urged protesters to go home and avoid bloodshed, while the feared pro-government militia, the Basij, beat protesters with clubs and electric prods.

In some places, the protesters pushed back, rushing the militia in teams of hundreds, pitching at least three basijis from their motorcycles and setting the vehicles on fire. The protesters included many women, who even berated as “cowards” men who fled the basijis.

In all, there seemed some restraint on both sides. The protesters did not appear in the same huge numbers as earlier last week, and while the police fired shots, they appeared — so far — to be in the air.

“If they open fire on people and if there is bloodshed, people will get angrier,” said one protester, Ali, 40. “They are out of their minds if they think with bloodshed they can crush the movement.”

There had been varying reports in the hours leading up to the rally about whether it would be called off in the face of the state’s threatened crackdown. In the morning, black-clad security forces lined the streets of two squares in central Tehran as the city braced itself for a violent crackdown, witnesses said. State television reported that the leading opposition candidate, Mir Hussein Moussavi, had called off the protest, but some of his supporters, posting on social networking sites, urged demonstrators to gather.

But Web sites of two opposition figures declared the rally would be held. The Web site of Mehdi Karroubi, another presidential candidate who accused the government of fraud, said that contrary to reports on state media, the protests would go on and added that Mr. Karroubi, “the brave cleric, will join the rally” along with Mr. Moussavi and the former reformist president, Mohammad Khatami. On Mr. Moussavi’s Web site, a letter was posted from the Islamic Human Rights Group complaining of abuses by pro-government militia, which it said had attacked crowds and beat people with long sticks.

Journalists were banned from leaving their offices to report on the protests. A reporter from an American news organization said she had been called by a member of the Basij militia warning her not to go to the venue for the Saturday rally because the situation would be dangerous and there could be fatalities.

The authorities were also reported to have renewed an offer of a partial recount of the ballots in the disputed election — an offer that the opposition has previously rejected.

In a long and hard-line sermon on Friday, Ayatollah Khamenei declared the June 12 election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad valid and warned that demonstration leaders “would be responsible for bloodshed and chaos” if protesters continue, as they have pledged, to flood the streets in defiance of the government.

The tough words seemed to dash hopes for a peaceful solution to what defeated candidates and protesters called a fraudulent election last week, plunging Iran into its gravest crisis since the Islamic Revolution in 1979. Official results gave Mr. Ahmadinejad 63 percent of the vote to Mr. Moussavi’s 34 percent.

Regional analysts said that, by calling for an end to the demonstrations, Ayatollah Khamenei had inserted himself directly into the confrontation, invoking his own prestige and that of Iran’s clerical regime. But his speech also laid the groundwork to suppress the opposition movement with a harder hand, characterizing further protests as against the Islamic Republic itself.

Although Ayatollah Khamenei’s speech also included some conciliatory language about the opposition candidates, it remained unclear how the ongoing confrontation would affect Iran’s complex internal dynamics. One central figure was notably absent from Ayatollah Khamenei’s Friday sermon: the influential former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who has strongly backed Mr. Moussavi.

Iran’s National Security Council reinforced Ayatollah Khamenei’s warning on Saturday, state media reported, telling Mr. Moussavi to “refrain from provoking illegal rallies.”

The demand came in a letter from the head of the council, Abbas Mohtaj, after a formal complaint by Mr. Moussavi that law enforcement agencies had failed to protect protesters.

“It is your duty not to incite and invite the public to illegal gatherings; otherwise, you will be responsible for its consequences,” the letter said, according to state media.

Ahmad Reza Radan, a senior police officer, warned on state television that the police “will act with determination against all illegal demonstrations and protests.”

In a measure of the scale of the opposition’s complaints, one losing candidate in the June 12 election, Mohsen Rezai, a conservative former commander of the Revolutionary Guards, claimed to have won between 3.5 and 7 million votes compared to the 250,000 accorded to him in the first announcement of results a week ago, state-run Press TVreported Saturday.

And, in a sign of mixed signals emerging from the authorities, the English-language network also reported Saturday that Ibrahim Yazdi, a former foreign minister who leads an organization called Freedom Movement, had been released after being detained in a hospital earlier in the week. Several opposition figures, journalists and analysts were detained during a week of defiance that brought forth an array of official measures — part conciliatory, part repressive — to try to stem the protests.

Witnesses said that Mohammad Ghoochani, a prominent journalist and editor-in-chief of several reformist publications that had been shut down, was arrested Saturday by the authorities. There were no further details of his condition or location. On Saturday, the authorities also invited the three opposition candidates to attend a meeting with the 12-member Guardian Council, an authoritative panel of clerics which oversees and certifies election results. But only one candidate — Mr. Rezai — attended, Press TV said.

The panel has been presented with 646 complaints of electoral irregularities, the authorities have said.

Mr. Moussavi has expressed mistrust of the panel, accusing some of its members of campaigning before the election for Mr. Ahmadinejad.

Press TV quoted Abbas Ali Kadkhodaei, the council’s spokesman, as saying the body was investigating complaints including shortages and delays in the supply of ballot papers, the denial of access to polling stations by candidates’ representatives and intimidation and bribery of voters.

“Although the Guardian Council is not legally obliged,” Mr. Kadkhodaei was quoted as saying, “we are ready to recount 10 percent of the ballot boxes randomly in the presence of representatives of the candidates.”

The silence of the powerful media about the UN.

Josep Xercavins i Valls *

“The Conference on the crisis: a key moment for the future of the UN” and/or “The silence of the powerful media about what is happening at the UN”

In a few days the “UN Conference on the World Financial and Economic Crisis and Its Impact on Development” will take place in the United Nations Headquarters in New York, from 24 to 26 June 2009.

It is currently impossible to say how this conference is going to end. However, according to the process that led to this conference -with two main experts like D’Escoto and Stiglitz - and to the contents of its negotiation, we can probably say that it will mark a moment in history. On the one hand, for the future actions that will be carried out to put an end to the global crisis. On the other, for the impact it may produce on the future of the UN, especially (or not) on its future role in financial and economic governance. Last but not least, in relation to the crucial performance of the media when having to report about these subjects. This text discusses the power of the media and the future of the UN.

Above observation about the Press and the UN sounds like a joke.

Please see what we e-mailed to Mr. Gary Fowlie as we wanted to cover exactly this event - we were not honored with a reply as to-date.

***

To:  Mr. Gary Fowlie, Chief, Media Accreditation and Liaison Unit, United Nations Department of Public Information.

From: Pincas Jawetz, editor-in-chief The Sustainable Development Media Think Tank servicing www.SustainabiliTank.info

Date: June 16, 2009

Subject: Accreditation for the purpose of covering the June 24 - June 26, 2009, United Nations Conference on the World Financial and Economic Crisis and Its Impact on Development to be held at UN Headquarters in New York.

Dear Mr. Fowlie,

As per UN published material - I quote and attach bellow - you are personally in charge of the accreditation process - and with the history of your full knowledge of my own person and the media outlet that I have helped create, the fact that I am actually the editor in chief at www.SustainabiliTank.info - a worldwide recognized online media outlet - I apply directly to you in this e-mail to obtain the above mentioned accreditation.

a. I am the appointing officer of our media and I appoint myself - So this is my self-accreditation letter and letter of assignment.

b. My photocopies of Press card and Passport are - I trust - in your files - if you do not have them anymore they clearly will be provided in person.

c. I understand the need for an on-line accreditation form, but if I do not get your OK for my accreditation - according to history - it will just turn into a waste of time if I start the usual way.

d. As you know above UN meeting is on the top of interest priorities of our global readership, and it would be nice to serve them direct information from covering this from within the UN building.

Sincerely yours,

Pincas Jawetz

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The  Josep Xercavins i Valls * follows:
“The silence of the powerful media about what is happening at the UN”

What a pity! There were, there are and there will be so many things to explain, to analyze and to discuss in connection to the current crisis that I can not but claim against one of the worst manipulations of our times: the “unbearable” silence of the media about this UN Conference. An especially unbearable silence since it is only “heard” on the side of the richest and most powerful. Two extremely opposite examples prove these statements:

1. The powerful media could not do anything against the conference. On May 24, the New York Times published a very harsh article by Neil MacFarquhar, in which D’Escoto was described as “a ranking Sandinista and the fractious president of the United Nations GA”. Anyone can read it and form an opinion about it. The article gets quite distorted when it says that D’Escoto bases his proposals on a report by the Stiglitz Commission (not that caricaturable), a statement that the reader can only find at the end of the article - in an article that is hard to read.

What is really interesting, though, is the fact that -surprisingly- the article was not echoed by other media. They probably preferred to ignore it rather than vilify it. In my opinion, it was more dangerous for their interests to spread the word about the conference: they would then run the risk that someone may talk about its contents and even get excited about it.

2. An article of the author writing these lines, only published in the Other News of Roberto Savio (whose motto I’m “copying” now is a phrase appeared on the wall of Barcelona’s old Customs Office, at the beginning of 2003: “What walls utter, media keeps silent”), has appeared in some thousands of Spanish-speaking web pages (the English version was late and then I did not deem it appropriate to distribute it - what I now regret). The article was called: “From the G20 to the G192 -the UN- : At last, a real answer to the crisis?”

Obviously, in this case, the reason of this self-spreading over the Net was not the author’s name (totally unknown); it must be the interest for the subject itself. Therefore, and to use the terminology surrounding the crisis, there was and there is “market” for the subject. ¡Of course! In short, once again, the strategy has been to avoid talking about the conference and its contents, in order to avoid thinking a real alternative to the mentioned hegemony.

Apart from the seriousness of such silence, what is really alarming is that the citizens all over the world have been deprived of the necessary information to form their own opinion and to put pressure or not, in any direction, with regards to what is being discussed these days at the UN. As a result, the governmental representatives are busy in one of the most important processes in recent times, and yet in the dark. The only information about it is offered by the civil society organisations that, under the name of the “Global Social and Economic Group Crisis Group”, try to do the follow up, to lobby and inform about what is happening in the New York headquarters. This is allowing me, for instance, to write this article but, unfortunately, the power of the public opinion will not arrive in time.

It is not the moment to go into this in depth, but it is becoming clearer and clearer the urging need to fight for the freedom and the right to truthful and plural information about what is happening in the world.

“The Conference about the crisis: a key moment for the future of the UN”

The present global crisis is so important that also offer a window of opportunity in terms of global governance. At least, the crisis is playing and will play a substantial role in determining which “institutional” actors, which multi-polar international relations, which multilateral organisations, etc. will be more or less well placed in the political section of the “financial and economic tsunami”.

For the rich and most powerful countries -where the crisis, its causes and its first consequences were born and developed- the better would have been that nothing had changed in the political arena.  With a “dead” Bush, our current French “Napoleon”, Sarkozy, organised the first “party” of the G20, to pretend that things would change so that, as always, nothing changes.

An extraordinary meeting of the G8 would have been much more appropriate. These states (some more than others) were responsible for the crisis and, therefore, it was their duty to assume responsibilities and arrange things in their own homes.

Before the G20 meeting, one statement by the Forum UBUNTU raised some of the details of the situation:

1. Our perplexity, because the main protagonists who have worked to impose this model over the last 25 years, the G7 and the Bretton Woods Institutions (the IMF and the WB), are now taking on the role of saviours in this disaster, when they should rather be seen as the guilty parties to a large degree, and should consequently accept the responsibilities that pertain to them.

2. Our indignation regarding the meeting called for 14 November in Washington for, among others, the following reasons:

a. That precisely Washington, home of the Government and Organisations most responsible politically for what is now happening, is the one calling the meeting.

b. That invitations to the meeting have been issued in a totally arbitrary and discriminatory form. As if, for example, the poorest countries, those who have suffered most from this model and will probably suffer most from the consequences of the current debacle, had nothing to say about what to do now and in the future.

c. That it not only fails to take advantage of but even overshadows the Doha Conference on Financing for Development to Review the Implementation of the Monterrey Consensus, scheduled for 29 November to 2 December, especially when this Consensus includes a section on systemic - structural issues, which have been worked on for months in the United Nations’ most pluralistic and transparent framework, and which, appropriately reviewed and extended in the current context, could contribute to opening the way to a new world economic and financial model.

The G20 went by, above all, as a big media circus to stop any possible alternative movement, and the Doha Conference 2008 came, unfortunately despite predictably enough, to nothing.

However, history has its own ins and outs. The General Assembly of the UN is been presided since last September - although the appropriate election was carried out months earlier - by Father Miguel D’Escoto. Because of his strong determination, he dared to open a new approach, different of the G20’s one, to look, analyze and to propose about the crisis: the “Stiglitz Commission” (created, by the way, just a few weeks before the first meeting of the G20) and he also managed to introduce the following article on the Doha Declaration 2008:

79. The United Nations will hold a Conference at the highest level on the world financial and economic crisis and its impact on development. The Conference will be organised by the President of the UN General Assembly and its modalities will be defined by March 2009 at the latest.

It was not in March, nor the first week of June, but now it seems impossible that the Conference does not take place the last week of June. We will later have more time to relate all the obstacles that were overcome to get to this end.

Although d’Escoto managed to get approved an article (the above article) whose  restrictive reading would prevent the Conference to treat further matters other than the effects of the crisis on development - an argument repeatedly used at the negotiations’ table by, amongst others, the US and Europe -, our ‘Father D’Escoto’ has grabbed the opportunity and put all his energy in, precisely, transforming the Conference into a milestone, possibly ‘historic’, that can place the UN at the front of the world financial and economic governance.

In an interview with Cuba’s official newspaper Gramma (which denotes either a certain naivety or an excess of confidence…), Father D’Escoto explains:

We are facing a totally unprecedented situation. We have to remember that it is been always prohibited for the General Assembly to discuss or intervene in international financial affairs, such matters were reserved to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank (WBG) and the World Trade Organisation (WTO). But this situation cannot continue like this… So this summit to be held in June will be the first opportunity in the history of the United Nations to tell everyone: ‘come and lets all talk’. We are -and we must be - in the 21st Century, the Century of Reconciliation and of inclusive democracy. We do not want only the G-8 or the G-20 to be the ones that speak or take decisions, we will respect their criteria (opinions), we will listen, but in a real democracy, the majority decides, that is why I have started to insist that the voice of the G-192 must be THE voice, that of all members of the United Nations. There are good feelings about the meeting, convened at the highest level, because this battle has to be made at the United Nations in order to participate democratically in the design of a new financial, economic, monetary and trade architecture. That is what we pretend to do. I think that the meeting in June will be considered as the first session of a meeting that will be kept open.

It is indeed the role of the United Nations what really is under discussion these days, about its role in governing financial and economic issues. It is therefore an incredible window of opportunity, in the short and medium term, to achieve a UN different from what it is today. That is, from a UN that is the complex and contradictory result of:

a) a physical place where the Security Council hosts the winners of the Second World War; b) the main reference of international law around the various Human Rights Declarations; c) a necessary humanitarian agency, although with a lot to improve, as it is normally the case in all human endeavours; d) etc.

to a UN that is a real institution of world democratic governance (which can only be achieved and exerted when politics decide over finances and economy). A UN that is the real expression of consensus-building capacity - whenever it is possible - amongst the states of the world, or else the result of democratic majorities reached in the General Assembly. Despite the usual criticisms about the democratic legitimacy of the UN General Assembly where each member state has a vote - something that must be corrected, but that this text will not deal with -, the reality tends to correct it as key decisions reflect the relative positions of the biggest current groupings (US, Europe, G77 and China, Russia, etc.).

And finally, if I write these lines today and now, it is because I see some signs for hope:

1) a certain re-composition of the G77 (the group of 140 countries that normally negotiates together as the voice of the developing countries) that, having recovered those members who shared tablecloths with rich and powerful countries in the G20 meetings, is now together behind proposals such as the creation of a Economic Security Council or the review of the harmful agreement (and original sin of the multilateral international organisations) between the UN and the Bretton Woods Institutions to bring them back under the real and effective supervision and coordination of a strengthened ECOSOC; and

2) the feeling that the Obama US, even with a confused Europe, has not put up much resistance to debating and negotiating all these issues given the strength -immeasurable and maybe immaterial- of “our Father D’Escoto”.

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*Josep Xercavins i Valls, Professor at Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC); former coordinator of the UBUNTU Forum Secretariat

The Prologue:

The Dear Leader Kim Jong Il  and The Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei seem to present to the world their proud contention of being indeed The Axis of Evil that was originally suggested by former President G.W. Bush. (Bush had there also Saddam Hussein, and John Bolton was claiming also the rights of Fidel Castro, Muammar al-Gaddafi, and Bashar al-Assad. Since then Saddam Hussein is gone and his country is normalizing slowly, and the Bolton three are at various stages of trying to undo their fame.) What is clear is that a country is not evil - only its leader can be evil. He can nevertheless influence his people and the country as a whole can become then dangerously evil. That is what happened to Germany and Austria under Adolf Hitler  - The FUERER or THE LEADER -  and that might happen now to North Korea under Kim Jong Il, while there is hope that this is not the case of Iran where the young people may show that they did not absorb the indoctrination that is being dished out in those mosques.

Enter a new US President - Barack Hussein Obama - and he declares that we do not play anymore the game of blame. There is no evil we should not attempt to talk with, and that was completely fine with us. He indeed tried to address the real problems of the world but Jong Il and Ali Khamenei seem to insist that they cannot be by-passed - they want to be recognized as holdovers  entitled  to the crown of evil.

Enter a fly to the White House, in full view of world TV, and forces President Obama to take a resolute immediate reaction - the fly gets squished!

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The Drama:

The students and younger generation, also the internet enlightened women of Iran, they see the obvious - the elections in which they participated in a symbolic vote for Mr. Moussavi, where highhandedly high-jacked by President Ahmadi-Nejad. They chose to go to the street to protest the fact that their symbolic vote was not counted.

They know that Moussavi was also agreed upon by The Supreme Leader, but they liked the contender’s wife who stood by him during the campaign. This was progress, and they were ripe to submit to slow progress - as long as there will be change. Surely, they would prefer faster change, but change in a positive direction was change nevertheless, and they blessed on it.

The Supreme Leader’s support of Ahmadi-Nejad’s holding onto power - honesty or not - has now the potential of turning the obvious into real rebellion - and this is a clear Iran problem. What should Washington do?

Obama is right - stay the course and stay out. the Supreme Leader with old Nazi style information training, will blame the US if it does or if it does not - but the Iranian people - at least a great part of them - will recognize the present US non-involvement and thus the Leader’s lies. It will strengthen their hand in their conviction that time has come for real change and indeed for a new Iranian revolution - this time without the US having caused it!

The same goes for the UK - stay out because in the past you did enough mischief in that part of the world and non-involvement now is the best way to stage the local people’s own involvement according to their own real interests.

 How does a sigle fly show the way to a wondering US President?

The story actually starts with Rene Descartes lying in bed, sometime in 1628, and watching flies. He was trying to track the flies’ position and he realized that he could describe a fly’s position by inventing coordinate geometry - that was the start of the Cartesian coordinate system and a philosophy with “Rules of the Direction of Mind,” that watching what the church did to Galileo in 1633, was eventually published only in 1701 (Descartes lived 1596 - 1650).

Seemingly, a descendant of that 1628 Cartesian fly entered the White House this week to lead President Obama in his search of what to do with Leaders of Evil.

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Some in Washington, like Senator John McCain, are trying to trip President Obama, this while the world is learning of the broken bones of precious team members - Robert Gates, Sonia Sotomayor and Hillary Clinton. Senator McCain would like the US to intervene in Iran and see more killing and direct harm to the US. That is his right of having no responsibility for his positions. We think he also did not contemplate in depth the Cartesian fly’s self-sacrifice. Others thought that Dick Cheney might like see the US in trouble in order to vindicate his own failed policies.

Today’s newspapers are full of stories about US fortifying Hawaii Defenses Against North Korean arms and missile threats. Now that is another yet to be cooked case of raw thinking.

More solid thinking suggests that if change in Iran does occur, there is chance that also it will impact on the nuclear issue, but if repression does not allow for change, there is a chance that the outside world changes and more powers are ready to hold Iran on a shorter leash.

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The Epilogue:

Obama - The President of the United States - learned from the fly incident that when a nasty intruder gets close to you - you just squish him. The facts are that he did not get up from his seat to chase out the intruding fly.

North Korea, has no velvet, orange, or green revolution - its youth has been brainwashed and all what they know is to march in lockstep. This is a very sorry situation and in Gilbert & Sullivan language - “they never shall be missed.” On the other hand - in Iran there is a new generation of talented people that might yet bring about change - that is in their own country - or as said if this did not work out - in our countries.

North Korea is a candidate for immediate squishing - Iran is not - but with a caveat!

So, when the first North Korean ship does not stop for inspection as ordered by the UN Security Council, give it short warning and SINK IT. Be ready to take on any other mischief from the Dear Leader and follow him to the end - this is the squishing part. They shall not be missed.

Iran, will watch what goes on with North Korea and learn. The larger lesson is that squishing does happen. The wise is expected to learn from this. The pinpointed study is that people that follow blindly a “Dear Leader” get punished eventually.

As per Earthjustice e.Brief  - to my horror, four months into the Obama Administration - we just found out that:

After years of delay and denial from past administrations, the Environmental Protection Agency is finally taking steps to declare that greenhouse gas emissions threaten the public’s health and welfare - which means they have not done it yet!The time has come for this action, and we need to encourage the EPA to move swiftly on it.

The EPA is proposing two historic findings under the Clean Air Act: that greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, endanger public health, and that emissions from motor vehicles contribute to climate change. This is a critical first step for the EPA to take in order to tackle climate change pollution.

The findings follow a decision by the Supreme Court which said the EPA has authority to regulate pollutants responsible for global warming under the Clean Air Act. Earthjustice argued the case at the appellate level in 2005.

While the EPA’s current proposal is a necessary first step, there are additional steps the EPA can take, such as setting actual standards to regulate greenhouse gases, particularly from motor vehicles in the U.S., which contribute 4 percent of climate change emissions, and from other mobile sources such as ships and airplanes, which contribute another 4 percent.

We know that the EPA is hearing from polluters in the fossil fuel industry who want to keep the status quo, stop the EPA from moving forward, and protect their record-breaking profits. We can’t let them go unchallenged.

Please join with people across the nation and tell EPA to formally embrace these findings, and then act without delay to regulate greenhouse gas polluters.

 Former President Bill Clinton, who earlier this week shared the podium with UNSG Ban Ki-moon at the UN, when the latter appointed him as his representative for Haiti, was scheduled to share with him also the dinner table, podium, and the “GLOBAL HUMANITARIAN AWARD of THE FOREIGN POLICY ASSOCIATION at its 2009 Global Philanthropy Awards Dinner, Wednesday, June 17th, 2009, at the St. Regis Roof Ballroom, Midtown Manhattan.

Considering that all at the UN seem to believe that Mr. Ban Ki-moon has actually started already his re-election campaign, at a time he is very much under criticism for the very low key ways he handles important issues that end up in his lap - this as his main focus seems to be on the dictum “do not offend” when this applies to the main powers that will decide on his reelection. He makes statements that are not intended to lead to results, and some actually even question sometimes the veracity of what was said - this is unforgivable.

We looked at all of this and concluded, these last days, that Bill Clinton was ill advice at cooperating with the UNSG if he is simply used as a way to collect IOUs from the US Administration to be used later in the re-election campaign.

We wrote about this at: http://www.sustainabilitank.info/?s=Ban+…

Thinking about the FPA event, further, these days of Washington’s involvement in Climate Change, sharing the podium also with the CEO of the Italian oil company - ENI - who was getting the FPA’s Corporate Social Responsibility Award - might also not have been the greatest idea either.

Last night I went to St. Regis, saw the Sri Lankan Tamils demonstrating across the street and asking where was Ban Ki-moon when 30, 000 of their people were being killed? Why does he get that Humanitarian Award? They would rather see him go home.

Upstairs, at the dinner table, I saw Mr. Ban Ki-moon, but could not find Mr. Clinton.

Then, when the speaking part started we were informed that Bill Clinton is a no-show. We were told that he could not come because of an emergency in the family - but we were not told what happened. The quiet of the announcement took me back, and I must confess that my feeling was that we were not told the whole truth and secretly I was hoping that Mr. Clinton just decided that this company became too hot for him, and for his wife who is now the official of the family. I listened to the Ban Ki-moon speech, the Paolo Scaroni speech, picked up an ENI documents gift bag, and went home where my wife told me that it was on TV that Hillary Clinton fell and injured her right elbow.

I got my lesson of not jumping to conclusions in the future before collecting more facts, but to be honest, even though I am very sorry for Hillary Clinton’s injury - I think she saved him from future embarrassment as it might have happened had he shared the dinner table last night.

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WASHINGTON – Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton fractured her right elbow during a fall Wednesday, her chief of staff said. Clinton was on her way to the White House when she fell chief of staff Cheryl Mills said.

Clinton was treated at The George Washington University Hospital, just a few blocks from State Department headquarters, before going home. She will undergo surgery to repair her elbow in the coming week, Mills said.

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Who was at the event? Obviously, many of the FPA members that paid $1,000 per person for that priviledge, but this time also many UN Ambassadors of oil producing countries and at least one top current official of a US oil company. When I looked for the very few Ambassadors from non-oil countries, I found that in India and Poland there is involvement By ENI as well.

Looking at the hand-out material from ENI - it comes in tabloid sized journals called simply “Oil” - the March 2009 Editorial evaluates the new Administration in Washington as: “The begining, however was warm, without being heartwarming.” The first article says that the real world crisis is water and then an article by former Senator Gary Hart, being introduced as a “renowned green politician” who advocates adapting a new lifestyle and energy saving as the only choice for America if it wants to free itself from dependency on oil supplies from the Gulf. Then “The challenge for Obama is foreign policy and not the economy.” That issue was called “Up & Down” and also contained among other material an interview - “Talking to Daniel Yergin” (from the Boston based CERA consultants) - “The impetus towards recovery from the energy industry - the transformations in the energy world will contribute to counterbalancing the downturn. The US and China will form a new axis of international growth.” Talking about Europe ENI finds that “Disunity can be Strength.” There is a positive article about India - “Elephant fights back,” there is the prediction of China increasing consumption, and of Cuba producing oil.

The June issue of “Oil” titled “the choice.” It starts with pieces on “the theocratic democracy in Iran” and then moves about Iran to “the future lies underground” and this means oil and more oil - leading to Obama’s “the choice” and it is about the US-Iran relationship - with protagonists - Obama and Ahmadi-Nejad. “Obama’s overture - the cold and the lukewarm.” It goes deeper - into “IRANOMICS” studying the policy mistakes made by the US in the past and the few issues US diplomacy should concentrate with. ENI finds that Ayatollah and the US have converging interests. Europe, above all, would gain most from a possible easing of tensions. However, talking to an Iranian ex-governor of the Central Bank - Moscow and some Arab countries are opposed to this for fear of losing their role. Not bad as policy studies paid for by oil!

From here to the need for “mature” diplomacy asa understood by Brent Scowcroft of the Nixon days and keeping an eye on geopolitics as seen by Richard Nathan Haass of the Council on Foreign Relations a clearly solid Republican home.

The former Italian Ambassador too India and Iran, Roberto Toscano, finds “less ideology in the Iranian puzzle” and he lifts the veil “on the “curse of oil and the role played by Italy.” Looking back to the days of Cyrus, Darius, and Xerxes, there is hope in finding a future of thawing of relations with Iran that everyone can benefit. There is some more material and we clearly were impressed though we think that all of this goes against what President Obama said about Iraq that paraphrased meant - we will not be after your oil. Now clearly, if Washington does not find other topics of conversation with Iran in order to build a relationship - all of the above is rightly nothing more then another road to disaster.

We hope that someone sent a package of ENI to the missing Bill Clinton and we hope he would think like us - that this is not what Obama and Hillary need.

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To the essence of the event,  I will defer to  the excellent report by InnerCityPress - the writing is so good that we will not attempt to compete with it. I will only add that in his opening, when Mr. Ban Ki-moon tipped his hat to the Tamils, he said that he was the first and last of the world leaders to go to Sri Lanka. He also said he met there with Tamil leaders but as we understand from the press - the last point of meeting Tamils is being left in contention by people that were there with him - but where it seems that he does have a point is the fact that in today’s world the Tamils rank for nothing - so if nobody else in leadership position is speaking up for them - who is he to do so?Aha! but he is just getting the Humanitarian Award of the world corporate philanthropies - does that pass onto him the responsibility to go further then the common politicians?

UN’s Ban Tips Hat to Protesters from High Above NY, Claims He Met With Tamils.

Byline: Matthew Russell Lee of Inner City Press at the UN: News Analysis

UNITED NATIONS, June 17 — It was projected as a light evening of honor for UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, to receive from the Foreign Policy Association a Global Humanitarian Award, along with former US president Bill Clinton.

Clinton, however, canceled his appearance due to “family health issues” — word on the street, literally 55th Street in front of the St. Regis Hotel, was that Hillary was in a car crash. And Ban himself was protested, for hours, with chants urging him to resign, or to “go home,” or at least to feel shame.

The protesters, it must be said, were nearly entirely ethnic Tamils. Despite the tens of thousands of people killed in the war in Sri Lanka, unlike Darfur, Myanmar or the Middle East, the victims have yet to gain noticeable solidarity from non-Tamils. This feels of abandonment was palpable Wednesday night in front of the St. Regis Hotel.

Please read the excellent full report at: http://www.innercitypress.com/untrip4may…

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